USA > History > 2010 > Politics (I)

Rob Rogers

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania

Cagle

25 October 2010

L: George W. Bush, Republican, former U.S. president

Related > Bill Clinton, Democrat, former U.S. president

Parties Ramp Up Appeals

on Last Weekend of Campaigning

October 31, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — Republicans made their closing argument on Sunday for capturing control of Congress, assailing President Obama as a champion of wasteful and excessive government, as Democrats countered that returning power to Republicans would embolden corporations and the wealthy with disastrous results for middle-class Americans.

Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. converged on Ohio in hopes of rekindling the passion Democrats displayed two years ago in sending the pair to the White House.

“In two days, you have a chance to once again say, ‘Yes, we can,’ ” Mr. Obama said at a rally in Cleveland, reprising the theme of his 2008 campaign. “There is no doubt that this is a difficult election.”

But Representative John A. Boehner, who is poised to become speaker if Republicans win the House, offered a rebuttal as he crisscrossed the state, warning voters not to be taken in by familiar promises of changing Washington.

“Washington hasn’t been listening to the American people; I think it’s been disrespecting the American people,” Mr. Boehner said, firing up Republicans in Columbus. He flashed a sign of confidence, saying: “We’re going to have a big night on Tuesday night — a really big night.”

Republicans are positioned to reach or surpass the number of House seats that they picked up in 1994, according to strategists and independent analysts, when the party gained 54 and ended four decades of Democratic dominance in the House.

The ranks of vulnerable Democrats deepened, with House seats in Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island becoming susceptible to a potential Republican wave that could exceed the 39 seats needed to win control. Democrats clung to hope that they could hold on to the Senate by at least a seat or two.

As the White House prepared for widespread losses on Tuesday, it sought to minimize the political damage to the party and to Mr. Obama’s re-election chances in two years by urging its supporters to work even harder to help narrow the gap in tight races.

Former President Bill Clinton began a nine-state sweep to help preserve the Democratic majority, rallying voters along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida. The focus on Democratic-leaning states, including Congressional races in New York and Connecticut and races for governor in Maine and New Hampshire, underscored the degree to which Democrats are almost entirely on defense against Republicans at a time when the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and the nation is deeply divided over issues like health care.

The most expensive Congressional contest in the country’s history, with spending of nearly $4 billion, drew to a close with a presidential-style deployment of campaign volunteers from Alaska to Florida intended to get out the vote, even though more than half of Americans participating in the election have already cast early ballots.

Few states were spared a last barrage of television advertisements, many of which featured Republicans trying to capitalize on the suggestion of change.

In California, the Republican candidate for the Senate, Carly Fiorina, said, “We can change Washington, but not unless we change the people we send there.” In Nevada, the Republican nominee for the Senate, Sharron Angle, said, “They promised change, now it’s our turn.”

In New Jersey, John Runyan, a Republican candidate for the House, declared: “If you’re tired of the way this country is run, then let’s change the people who run it.”

Democrats were bracing for substantial losses across the ballot, from state legislative races to governorships to Congress, with incumbents imploring voters to give them more time to create jobs, improve the economy and control state and federal spending. It remained an open question whether the party’s extensive get-out-the-vote operation could diminish what party leaders fear could be widespread defeats.

“This is not a year to sit on your hands,” said Diane Denish, the lieutenant governor of New Mexico, a Democrat who is in an uphill fight to win the governor’s race. “It’s more important than ever to get off your behind and get out of the shade and get into the heat, as we say in the oil fields.”

In the House, 29 Democratic-held seats are either leaning Republican or are all but lost to Republican candidates, according to the latest analysis of Congressional races by The New York Times, while 42 seats held by Democrats are seen as tossups. Even if Republicans win only half of the tossup seats, they will have passed the threshold of 39 they need to win control.

Democrats were also fighting to preserve their majority in the Senate. The five Senate contests considered tossups will help determine if the party holds control, according to the analysis by The Times, with Republicans trying to capture Democratic-held seats in Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, is in one of the closest races in the country against Ms. Angle. After a year of combative and piercing television ads, Mr. Reid’s closing message to voters was not an argument on issues, but rather a plea to voters to reject his opponent.

“Harry Reid, fighting for us,” an announcer says, with images of Mr. Reid appearing with workers across Nevada. “Sharron Angle: pathological.”

Republicans were looking for new patches of opportunity, scouring districts that only weeks ago would have been unthinkable. The First Congressional District of Rhode Island, which for 16 years has been represented by Patrick J. Kennedy, was suddenly seen as winnable terrain for Republicans. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and an aspiring Republican presidential candidate, was scheduled to visit the district on Monday.

Republicans sent party leaders across the country on Sunday on behalf of their candidates. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, campaigned in northern Wisconsin for Sean Duffy, a former reality television star who is running for the seat held by David R. Obey, a Democrat who is retiring after 41 years in Congress. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota traveled to Iowa to build support for legislative candidates.

The most heavily-traveled state on Sunday, though, was Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win up to six Congressional districts, one Senate contest and the governor’s race. After the president and vice president appeared together in Cleveland, Mr. Biden stopped in Toledo for an evening rally for Gov. Ted Strickland, who is in a race that is too close to call with John Kasich, a former Republican congressman.

For weeks, the White House has put more emphasis on Ohio than nearly any other state, but over the weekend, signs of a Republican revival were underscored by Mr. Boehner’s rare public appearances in his own state. He zipped from district to district as he worked to expand the Republican advantages in the House and deliver a counterargument to the president.

“They have been coming here for months? Why? You might think it’s to help Ted Strickland. What he is really coming for is to help himself,” Mr. Boehner said on Sunday evening at his final stop, in Chillicothe. “He knows that in 2012 if he doesn’t have Ted Strickland in office, his re-election chances are seriously damaged.

“So if you want to send President Obama a message about spending and about takeovers and bailouts and all the nonsense,” Mr. Boehner added, “go out there on Tuesday and vote for John Kasich.”

Reporting was contributed by David M. Herszenhorn in Chillicothe, Ohio; Dan Frosch in Española, N.M.; and Ashley Parker in Washington.

Parties Ramp Up Appeals on Last Weekend of Campaigning, NYT, 31.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/us/politics/01campaign.html

Drowning in Campaign Cash

October 30, 2010
The New York Times

Shrill political attacks have saturated the airwaves for months, but behind them is the real problem of this demoralizing election: the dark flow of dollars, often secretly provided by donors with very special interests.

The amount is staggering: Nearly $4 billion is likely to be spent once the final figures are in, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, far more than in the 2006 midterms, which cost $2.85 billion. It could even eclipse the $4.14 billion spent in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Much of this is a direct creation of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., which has cut away nearly all campaign finance restrictions.

The court’s 2007 decision in Wisconsin Right-to-Life gave corporations and unions the right to run advocacy ads in the last 60 days of a campaign — as long as they did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate. This year’s Citizens United decision effectively ended even that last restriction, and pulled away all limits on corporate spending in campaigns.

Building on those decisions, political operatives — mainly Republicans — decided they could collect unlimited amounts of money through independent, tax- exempt organizations known as 501(c) groups, without revealing the source of the donations.

By offering anonymity and no limits, these groups (with gauzily apolitical names, like American Future Fund and American Action Network) have been able to raise and spend extraordinary sums. In the 2006 midterms, outside groups not affiliated with political parties spent $51.6 million; so far this year, such groups have spent $280 million. About 60 percent of that spending is from undisclosed donors, most of which has benefited Republicans. Democratic candidates raised huge amounts, but the sources for most of it were disclosed.

Combining both traditional and outside money, Republicans have slightly outraised Democrats, $1.64 billion to $1.59 billion, but there is more to be tallied.

While large secret donations have been legalized, it is not clear that the 501(c) groups spending the money on barrages of attack ads are playing by the last, threadbare rules. The tax code requires that these groups not be “primarily engaged” in political advocacy, but neither the Internal Revenue Service nor the Federal Election Commission has made any apparent effort to investigate what other purpose they might have. Some groups have suggested they would begin nonpolitical activities — after the election.

What is clear is that the new world of unlimited spending, both open and secret, confers huge benefits on wealthy individuals, corporations and unions. In a striking example, reported by ABC News last week, Terry Forcht, a prominent Kentucky banker and nursing home executive, helped pay for a series of attack ads against Attorney General Jack Conway, the Democratic Senate candidate. Mr. Conway is prosecuting one of Mr. Forcht’s nursing homes for allegedly covering up sexual abuse.

Mr. Forcht has directly raised at least $21,000 for Mr. Conway’s Republican opponent, Rand Paul. He serves as the banker for American Crossroads, the shadowy group of nonprofits organized by Karl Rove that has spent nearly $30 million to defeat Democrats and more than $1 million to defeat Mr. Conway.

This year, of course, is just batting practice for 2012. Congress still has time to act. The first step is to pass the Disclose Act, which would require the identification of large campaign donors. The second is to create a public financing system for Congressional candidates that provides extra money to those who rely on small donations.

Voters say — again and again — that they want to break the hold of special interests and end pay-to-play politics. And politicians promise — again and again — that they will. Four billion dollars and one particularly ugly campaign later, there can be no more excuses.

    Drowning in Campaign Cash, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31sun1.html

McDonald’s Workers Are Told Whom to Vote for

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — When workers in a McDonald’s restaurant in Canton, Ohio, opened their paychecks this month, they found a pamphlet urging them to vote for the Republican candidates for governor, Senate and Congress, or possibly face financial repercussions.

The pamphlet appeared calculated to intimidate workers into voting for Republican candidates by making a direct reference to their wages and benefits, said Allen Schulman, a Democrat who is president of the Canton City Council and said he obtained a copy of the pamphlet on Wednesday.

The pamphlet said: “If the right people are elected, we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above the current levels. If others are elected, we will not.”

It then named three Republican candidates after stating, “The following candidates are the ones we believe will help our business move forward.”

The store’s owner, Paul Siegfried, did not return a call for comment, but a spokesman for McDonald’s USA, the parent company, said: “It was an unfortunately lapse in judgment on Mr. Siegfried’s part. He’s disappointed with himself.”

The spokesman, Joe Woods, e-mailed a statement on Mr. Siegfried’s behalf. “For those that I have offended, I sincerely apologize,” the statement said.

Mr. Woods said Mr. Siegfried’s action did not represent the policy of McDonald’s.

Mr. Schulman, who is a lawyer, said that distribution of the pamphlet — which was printed on a McDonald’s letterhead — violates a 1953 Ohio statute that prohibits political material from being attached to wage envelopes. He declined to comment on how he got a copy, or who gave it to him, but said it was distributed to employees within the past week.

He said he had forwarded a copy to the authorities in Canton, requesting that they investigate.

Joe Martuccio, the law director for the city of Canton, said by telephone on Friday he was in the process of determining whether the distribution occurred within city limits and whether he had the authority to investigate.

“We have to determine the facts first,” he said.

The incident came as liberal voting-rights groups expressed concern that conservative complaints about fraudulent voting would lead to a reduced turnout on Election Day. Some Tea Party members have announced plans to question voters at the polls whom they suspect of being ineligible.

The incident also highlighted how fraught politics have become just days before the midterm elections in Ohio, a key battleground state, where incumbent Democrats are struggling for their survival.

    McDonald’s Workers Are Told Whom to Vote for, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/politics/30ohio.html

In ‘Daily Show’ Visit, Obama Defends Record

October 27, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — If you are president of the United States and you take your campaign get-out-the-vote blitz to a fake news program, do you get tweaked, or do you get a pass?

You get tweaked, as President Obama discovered Wednesday, when he made his first appearance as president on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. As the host, Jon Stewart, needled him, the president declared that he never promised transformational change overnight.

“You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ” Mr. Stewart said at one point. At another, he wondered aloud whether Mr. Obama had traded the audacity of 2008 for pragmatism in 2010, offering a platform of “Yes we can, given certain conditions.”

Mr. Obama paused for a moment. “I think I would say, ‘Yes we can, but —— ”

Mr. Stewart, laughing, cut him off. The president pushed ahead, finishing his sentence: “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience — young people who turned out in droves for the president, but who are deeply dissatisfied with him. Mr. Obama is spending the waning days of the election season trying to motivate that crowd to get to the polls, and he closed the interview by urging them to do just that, telling Mr. Stewart he wanted to make “a plug just to vote.”

Mr. Stewart, for his part, pressed the president with the standard liberal critique, accusing him of pursuing a legislative agenda that “felt timid at times” — a characterization Mr. Obama fiercely disputed.

The president wound up defending his health bill, members of Congress and even members of his administration. When Mr. Stewart asked why Mr. Obama, after promising to shake things up, had brought in old Democratic hands like Lawrence H. Summers, the Clinton Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama offered what, for Mr. Summers, was perhaps an unfortunate reply.

“In fairness,” he said, “Larry Summers did a heck of a job.”

Late-night television has come a long way since Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate, played his saxophone for Arsenio Hall in 1992. The lines between entertainment and news are increasingly blurred — in part because Mr. Obama has been willing to take his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have viewed as unconventional.

Mr. Obama has appeared as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Show with David Letterman”; over the summer, he dished with the doyennes of daytime television on ABC’s “The View.” (“I wanted to pick a show that Michelle actually watches,” he told them.)

“The Daily Show” interview was taped in the run-up to a rally Mr. Stewart and his fellow Comedy Central host, Stephen Colbert, are hosting Saturday on the National Mall. It went longer than anticipated — so long, in fact, that the show’s producers decided to cut the original introduction Mr. Stewart taped, which featured a riff of the host fiddling with a pen and tapping his fingers as he pretended to make the president wait in the wings, and his introduction of Mr. Obama as “White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee’s boss.”

In the interview, Mr. Obama conceded that he understands the feeling among his supporters that he has not fundamentally changed the way Washington does business.

“When we promised during the campaign ‘change you can believe in,’ it wasn’t ‘change you can believe in in 18 months,’ ” he said. “It was ‘change you can believe in — but we’re going to have to work for it.’ ”

    In ‘Daily Show’ Visit, Obama Defends Record, NYT, 27.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/us/politics/28obama.html

Lobbyists Court Potential Stars of House Panels

October 26, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, hosted a fund-raising breakfast late last month for Representative Dave Camp that drew so many donors the firm’s lobbyists had to pull extra chairs into their largest conference room.

The day before, Mr. Camp was at a Capitol Hill town house owned by a founder of the Online Lenders Alliance, raising thousands of dollars more. And then there was the dinner reception and fund-raiser at Carmine’s, a downtown Italian restaurant, for Mr. Camp that same week.

To an outsider, it might be confounding why Mr. Camp, a relatively unknown Michigan Republican who has no viable challenger in his re-election bid this year, would be seeing such a flood of cash, including contributions from names like Bob Dole, the former United States senator turned lobbyist, and Joseph E. Gallo, the chief executive of E. & J. Gallo Winery in California.

But there is nothing mysterious for the lobbyists and corporate executives writing most of these checks. Mr. Camp is slated to take over the powerful, tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee if Republicans win the majority next week, transforming this low-key conservative Republican almost overnight into one of the most powerful men in town.

Across Washington, lobbyists have been working behind the scenes now for months to prepare for this possible power shift. Former aides to Mr. Camp, who now work as lobbyists, are checking in with their onetime boss, chatting with him and his aides about staff appointments he might make when he takes over the Ways and Means Committee, and what tax or health care issues will be at the top of his agenda. Other lobbyists have gone to his staff to try to get to the head of the line in presenting proposed tax changes that will benefit their clients.

“You don’t wait until Nov. 3 and say, ‘What is the plan,’ ” said Jennifer Bell, a former aide to Mr. Camp who is now a health care lobbyist. She flew to Michigan last month in part to catch up with Mr. Camp while he was in his district. “Obviously, it is the majority that sets the agenda.”

The chairman’s spot on the Ways and Means Committee has long been a magnet for big dollars; Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, saw his campaign war accounts surge after he took over the committee in 2007.

The full list of likely Republican chairmen is not yet known. The choices are based on a mix of seniority and popularity, and some positions are still up for grabs. And, of course, voters still have to decide, regardless of what the polls are predicting, which party will control Congress. Still, the jockeying to influence the class of likely new leaders started months ago.

Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California, who is slated to take over the Armed Services Committee, has been a particular focus of attention, as military contractors fret over spending cuts proposed by the Obama administration.

For his 2008 campaign, Mr. McKeon collected $86,000 from the military industry for his political action committee and re-election bid. This time, even before the two-year election cycle is over, he has pulled in nearly $400,000, and has emerged as the top recipient of money in both the House and the Senate from military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Two of his former aides — who now work as military industry lobbyists — cornered him last month at a Capitol Hill reception held to unveil a portrait of Mr. McKeon, painted to honor his former service as chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. (He held that spot for only several months, just before Republicans last lost control of Congress, but he still had a portrait commissioned.)

Recognizing the enormous power Mr. McKeon could soon have in helping shape Defense Department policy and spending, military contractors are teaming up with his office to form a new association of military suppliers they are calling the Aerospace Defense Coalition of Santa Clarita Valley, to make sure he can deliver as much money as possible to his district in California, where several of the big contractors already have large operations.

Mr. McKeon, who is known as Buck, has already hinted to industry lobbyists that he wants to push for more spending on unmanned aerial vehicles, which could benefit contractors in his district.

“Buck is a great advocate for our war fighters and for the industrial capabilities that support their mission,” said Hanz C. Heinrichs, a former aide to Mr. McKeon who now represents military contractors like L3 Communications..

One lobbyist who knows Mr. McKeon well and has contributed the maximum allowed by law to his re-election campaign has met with several military contractors in recent weeks as he seeks a way to profit from the rise of Mr. McKeon to chairman.

“I don’t want to count the chickens before they hatch,” said the lobbyist, referring not to the possible Republican takeover but to his possible surge in new clients. “But I would be surprised if it didn’t help me in one way or another. Business should be very good.”

Mr. McKeon, in a statement, said that if named chairman, he would continue a tradition of bipartisan leadership at the Armed Services Committee, “providing our warfighters and their families with the resources and support they need — and that commitment will continue regardless of the outcome in November.”

Mr. Camp declined a request for comment, but an aide to Mr. Camp, Sage Eastman, said his agenda would be dictated by voters not lobbyists.

“You are hired or fired based on your ability to reflect the will of the American people,” Mr. Eastman said.

The possible shift in power has also generated excitement among energy-sector lobbyists, who welcome the likely rise of Representative Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington, as chairman of the Natural Resources Committee. Even while oil was still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico this summer, Mr. Hastings was condemning the moratorium on new drilling, and tried to block a Democrat-backed bill that would impose new safety standards on off-shore drilling operations, while also increasing taxes that oil drilling companies must pay.

Mr. Hastings has long been popular with the oil and gas interests. He got $10,000 from the industries in the last election cycle. But this time around, he has collected $70,000, making him one of the top recipients of money from those industries. That contrasts with Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, the current committee chairman, who has been an outspoken critic of the oil industry, but is a major recipient of donations from railroad and coal mining executives.

Industry lobbyists said they were hopeful that the Natural Resources Committee under Mr. Hastings would take a more aggressive stand in challenging the many costly environmental and safety regulations the Obama administration has tried to impose on the industry.

“Clearly, he is pro-energy development,” said Michael D. Olsen, a former Natural Resources Committee staff member and Bush administration Interior Department official, who now is a lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani, a firm that specializes in energy.

In some cases, the lobbyists must wait for outcomes, like the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, which controls all federal spending. Representative Jerry Lewis of California is the senior Republican on the panel, but he may be blocked from the post because of party-imposed term limits.

Besides the jobs that affect certain industries, other names are emerging for leadership positions in the new Congress.

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who would lead the Budget Committee, has been a point person for Republican leaders on fiscal issues in recent years. Mr. Ryan is one of the “Young Guns,” a moniker that Republicans have used to brand a new generation of leadership, along with a recently released book of the same name.

Representative Darrell Issa of California is poised to become the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which puts him in position to investigate the Obama administration and issue subpoenas.

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida is expected to become chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Born in Havana, she is a strong opponent of the Communist government in Cuba and at one point called publicly for the assassination of Fidel Castro.

Fund-raising for all of these members is likely to become easier. Ed Kutler, a Republican lobbyist close to Mr. Camp, found that out when he organized a fund-raising event for him this year.

“I was calling around inviting clients to the event, asking if they would be willing to help out,” said Mr. Kutler, a onetime Republican aide in the House. “With one client, at first he said, ‘Probably not.’ Then there was a pause and he said, ‘If Republicans take over, could he be chairman?’ And then he said, ‘O.K., put me down.’ ”

Kitty Bennett and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

    Lobbyists Court Potential Stars of House Panels, NYT, 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/us/politics/27chairs.html

Democrats Retain Edge in Spending on Campaigns

October 26, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and GRIFF PALMER

Lost in all of the attention paid to the heavy spending by Republican-oriented independent groups in this year’s midterm elections is that Democratic candidates have generally wielded a significant head-to-head financial advantage over their Republican opponents in individual competitive races.

Even with a recent surge in fund-raising for Republican candidates, Democratic candidates have outraised their opponents over all by more than 30 percent in the 109 House races The New York Times has identified as in play. And Democratic candidates have significantly outspent their Republican counterparts over the last few months in those contests, $119 million to $79 million.

Republican-leaning third-party groups, however, many of them financed by large, unrestricted donations that are not publicly disclosed, have swarmed into the breach, pouring more than $60 million into competitive races since July, about 80 percent more than the Democratic-leaning groups have reported spending.

As a result, the battle for control of the House has been increasingly shaping up as a test of whether a Democratic fund-raising edge, powered by the advantages of incumbency but accumulated in the smaller increments allowed by campaign finance law, can withstand the continuing deluge of spending by groups able to operate outside those limits, according to an analysis of political spending by The Times.

It is difficult to provide an accurate, up-to-the-moment comparison that includes all three streams of campaign money — money spent by candidates, money spent by party committees and money spent by outside groups — because candidates have had to file financial reports that cover only up until mid-October. Moreover, certain types of so-called issue advertisements, which do not explicitly urge voters to cast their ballots one way or another but still attack or praise candidates ahead of the general election, had to be filed with the Federal Election Commission only beginning in September, or 60 days before voters go to the polls.

While activities like television and radio advertisements and mass mailings are reported to the commission soon after they are purchased, other kinds of spending, like get-out-the-vote efforts, are not.

In mid-October, however, based upon the campaign finance data available, Democrats actually had the spending advantage in about 60 percent of the 109 competitive House races and had invested, collectively, about 10 percent more money into the contests than Republican candidates and their aligned groups had over the previous few months.

Those outside groups have proven crucial, though. Expenditures by Republican-oriented independent groups in carefully selected races have been financial difference-makers in dozens of cases, more than enough to help put the Republicans within striking distance of recapturing the majority, especially considering the political headwinds faced by Democrats.

With the Democratic and Republican Congressional campaign committees essentially battling each other to a draw, Republican-leaning groups have used their financial heft to broaden the political map. Since July, they have put $100,000 or more into more than 80 percent of the races in play, many more than Democratic-leaning groups, who have invested $100,000 or more in about half of the competitive races.

Only in the last two weeks or so have Democratic-oriented groups finally begun to come close to matching the spending of their counterparts on the right. But in many cases they appear to be playing defense, rushing to bolster Democratic candidates in races in which Republican outside groups had been swamping them.

America’s Families First Action Fund, for instance, a new Democratic-aligned group that is able to accept contributions of unlimited size from individuals and corporations but regularly reports its donors to the election commission, has emerged in the last few weeks as a major player. But in almost all of the races it has been involved in, it is mostly laboring to keep up with Republican outside group spending.

Last week, for example, the group spent $362,000 on a television ad attacking Steve Southerland, the Republican challenger to Representative Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida. But the 60 Plus Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that bills itself as a conservative alternative to AARP, began attacking the Democratic incumbent on television as early as late August.

In the closing stretch of the campaign, Democratic candidates in competitive races generally have had more money in the bank to spend than their Republican counterparts. As of Oct. 13, Democrats in House races in play collectively had about $45 million in cash on hand, compared with about $32. million for Republicans.

In contest after contest, however, Democratic candidates with huge financial advantages over underfinanced Republican opponents have found themselves under siege.

Outside group spending has already far exceeded the total for the last midterm election cycle, in 2006, and is on track to surpass even what was spent by independent groups in 2008, a presidential election year, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The hand-to-hand political combat between candidates, who must inch along in their own fund-raising in relatively modest bites, and these groups, which are able to leapfrog ahead with the help of a single giant donation, casts in bold relief the kind of outsized influence corporate and individual megadonors to such organizations can exert on specific races.

Take, for example, the tight race in New York’s 20th Congressional District. Representative Scott Murphy, a Democrat who was elected in 2009 to replace Kirsten Gillibrand, after she ascended to the Senate, has spent $1.5 million since late August, compared with less than $400,000 by his Republican challenger, Chris Gibson, a retired Army colonel.

But Mr. Gibson has been helped by more than $700,000 in spending by Republican-leaning outside groups, while Democratic-leaning groups have spent less than $200,000 supporting Mr. Murphy.

American Crossroads, one of a pair of independent groups tied to Karl Rove, spent about $200,000 in mid-October on a television commercial attacking Mr. Murphy for his support of the health care overhaul.

The group’s most recent filings with the election commission revealed $14.7 million in donations since September, two-thirds of which essentially came from two people, Bob Perry, a Houston home builder, and Robert B. Rowling, a billionaire from Dallas.

Leading the way in independent group spending on House races has been the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has reported spending more than $12 million on “issue ads” in House races dating back to September, mostly attacking Democratic candidates.

Other top-spending Republican-oriented groups in House races include: American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group created this year by Republican operatives, which has reported spending about $10 million; the 60 Plus Association has disclosed expenditures of roughly $8 million; and American Future Fund, an Iowa-based nonprofit, has reported investing about $7 million in House races.

At over $5 million, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a labor union, has been the biggest outside group spender on the Democratic side, followed closely by America’s Families First Action Fund, with about $4.8 million.

    Democrats Retain Edge in Spending on Campaigns, NYT, 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/us/politics/27money.html

Clinton Battles Repeat of ’94 With Twist on ’08

October 25, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — There comes a point about five minutes into Bill Clinton’s standard stump speech when he argues that this campaign is so important that it lured him out of retirement. “I didn’t need to do this,” he said at a stop here over the weekend. “I’m not in politics anymore. I run a big foundation.”

It is certainly true that the former president runs a big foundation focused on everything from fighting AIDS in Africa to rebuilding Haiti after its killer earthquake. But for a man who says he is not in politics anymore, he sure sounds a lot like someone deeply involved in politics — and, truth be told, he seems to be loving every minute of it.

By the time he arrived at a sweltering community college gymnasium here on Sunday night, the nation’s 42nd president had already starred at 102 campaign events this season in a peripatetic journey across America to save the nation’s 44th president from the same fate he endured 16 years ago. The 103rd event encapsulated his argument against a repeat of the 1994 midterm elections that cost his party control of Congress, and helped continue erasing sour memories of his last campaign foray two years ago.

This time, Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama are on the same side, but their roles are vastly different. Where Mr. Obama was the popular fresh figure in the party vanquishing the Clinton dynasty in 2008, today Mr. Clinton is the most popular politician on the campaign circuit coming to the rescue of an embattled president. Gone is the bitter party elder flummoxed at the success of an inexperienced upstart; back is the happy warrior rousing crowds, fighting again a battle he once lost and at the same time polishing his own legacy.

“I have to tell you, it’s no secret that I did what I could to defeat President Obama, and I still like my secretary of state,” Mr. Clinton told the crowd here at Battle Creek, which laughed appreciatively at the mention of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. But, he added, “both he and the Congress have done a better job than most Americans think.”

Mr. Clinton sees Mr. Obama being in the same position he was in after two years in office; as he tells it, they both took painful actions to fix broken economies but it took time for Americans to feel the results. “There’s always a gap between when you start fixing things and when people feel fixed,” he told a crowd earlier in the day in Ann Arbor, where he stumped for Representative John D. Dingell.

The frenetic campaigning brings Mr. Clinton full circle again in his perpetual cycle of defeat and comeback. After the incendiary comments and hard feelings among Democrats two years ago, Mr. Clinton is now perhaps his party’s most sought-after campaigner, going to parts of the country where Mr. Obama does not venture these days, including Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and, on Monday, in his 105th event of the year, Texas.

Fifty-five percent of Americans viewed Mr. Clinton positively in a poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal last month, eight percentage points above Mr. Obama and the highest of 14 listed politicians or institutions.

“There’s probably no one better in this day and time to bring out the Democratic base than Bill Clinton,” said his longtime friend Skip Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas.

Associates said Mr. Clinton has gotten over the bruising battles with Mr. Obama. “That’s all way in the past,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and one of his best friends. “He’ll do anything President Obama asks him to do.”

Still, Mr. Clinton is not particularly close to Mr. Obama. He coordinates with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but makes his own decisions about whom to help. He has focused on aiding Democrats who endorsed Mrs. Clinton against Mr. Obama, like Representative Mark Schauer here in Battle Creek. Some Democrats call it a “retribution tour”; aides said they think of it as a “thank you tour.” And Mr. Clinton has helped some who did not take her side, most noticeably Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who is running for Senate.

Tellingly, Republicans save their fire when he comes to town. Ron Weiser, the Michigan Republican chairman, noted that Mr. Clinton drew a small crowd in Detroit on Sunday but the party mounted no counterattack. “People have respect for him,” Mr. Weiser said. He interpreted the campaign swing as good news for his side. “They have to be getting concerned, even desperate, if they have to bring in a former president,” he said.

For many Democrats, Mr. Clinton represents a period of peace and prosperity, and they overlook the scandals and political battles that scarred his presidency.

Martha Miller, a case manager at a homeless shelter who saw him in Battle Creek, said: “Obviously, the personal stuff just became a horrific distraction and it was sad. But all of us were in better shape when he left office.”

At 64, Mr. Clinton maintains a brutal pace. On instructions from his daughter, Chelsea, he has lost about 25 pounds and is “practically a vegan,” as one aide put it. The weight loss makes him appear older, but he looks better in person than on television. At rally after rally, he summons the energy to charge up a crowd without a teleprompter or even a written text in sight.

Typically filled with statistics and details, his message focuses on the good things Mr. Obama has done, like making it easier to repay student loans, and the bad things he blames on Republicans, like posing as fiscal conservatives. Along the way, he offers a bit of a valedictory of his eight years in office.

“I almost gag when I hear these Republicans lambasting the president and the Democrats in Congress — ‘Oh, they’re such big spenders, they’re just crazy, they’re quasi-socialists, they’ve gone hog-wild mad,’ ” he said in Ann Arbor. “I have a simple question: Who’s the last president to give you a balanced budget?”

That is an answer he wants everyone to know.

    Clinton Battles Repeat of ’94 With Twist on ’08, NYT, 25.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/politics/26clinton.html

Divide on U.S. Deficit Likely to Grow After Election

October 25, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — A midterm campaign that has turned heavily on the issue of the mounting federal debt is likely to yield a government even more split over what to do about it, people in both parties say, with diminished Democrats and reinforced Republicans confronting internal divisions even as they dig in against the other side.

In the weeks after next Tuesday’s elections, the White House and a lame-duck Congress will face immediate decisions testing the balance of power — on extending the Bush-era tax rates, approving overdue spending bills to keep the government operating and, possibly, debating the recommendations that President Obama has directed a bipartisan debt-reduction commission to offer by December.

The report of the 18-member commission, which includes a dozen senior members of Congress, six from each party, will help determine whether a bipartisan consensus exists to deal with the unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues.

The group has delayed making decisions until after the election, to avoid leaks that would become campaign fodder, but even some of its members doubt they can muster the 14 votes needed to send a package to Congress for a vote; at best they hope options left on the table, or agreed to by the chairmen — Erskine B. Bowles, a White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, the former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming — will find support in the spending-and-tax debates.

In interviews, a number of Democrats and Republicans agreed on one thing: For all the pre-election talk that a divided government could force the parties to work together, especially on cutting annual deficits, the opposite could just as well be true.

David Cote, the chief executive of Honeywell International and a member of the debt commission, said in an interview that “the thing that shocked me” was that the debt crisis had been predicted for decades because of the costs of federal benefits for the baby boom generation. “We need to have a more thoughtful, nuanced discussion about what we’re going to do and what exactly does this mean,” Mr. Cote said. “And I don’t see that happening. It seems like everybody wants to just argue.”

Democrats are all but certain to lose a number of seats and perhaps their majorities. Most of the casualties will be fiscally conservative Democrats from Republican-leaning areas, leaving a smaller, more solidly liberal caucus less inclined to support cost-saving changes in future Social Security benefits, for example.

Republicans’ ranks will almost certainly be strengthened by a wave of conservatives, including Tea Party loyalists, who are opposed to raising any taxes and to compromising with Democrats generally — a stand Congressional Republican leaders have adopted. And incumbents otherwise inclined to make deals are now wary, Republicans say privately, mindful of colleagues who lost primary challenges from Tea Party candidates.

Both parties also face internal rifts that could hinder any grand bargain to reduce the annual deficits adding to the accumulated debt, which by decade’s end will reach economically dangerous levels as more retirees claim Medicare and Social Security.

Most Republicans, especially those likely to be in Congress or running for president, are taking a hard line against tax increases, eager to court the Tea Party and antitax conservatives generally. But a growing minority is arguing that the projected debt is too great to shrink with spending cuts alone unless popular benefits and military programs are put under the knife.

“Everything has got to be on the table for discussion,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, who with Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, has formed a group of anti-deficit senators to promote the recommendations from the debt-reduction commission.

Given the coming influx of novice lawmakers, Mr. Chambliss said in an interview, “there are a lot of things people are going to have to be educated about, on the spending side as well as the revenue side.” He added: “They’re thinking we can come in and eliminate earmarks and everybody’s going to be happy on the spending side. Gee, that just scratches the surface.”

Yet the conservative blowback was fierce this month after Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a budget director for President George W. Bush and a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, suggested keeping an open mind about a consumption tax like the value-added tax used in Europe and a tariff on imported oil.

That kind of reaction cannot be lost on others. Two Republicans on the fiscal commission are Representatives Dave Camp of Michigan and Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who are in line to lead the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and the Budget Committee, respectively, if Republicans win a House majority. But they must be elected by other House Republicans in December and, Republicans say, a deal with Democrats on deficit-reduction measures could threaten that.

Democrats differ among themselves on whether to extend all the Bush tax cuts as Republicans demand, or just those for households with annual incomes below $250,000 as Mr. Obama wants. Over 10 years, an extension for the middle class would cost more than $3 trillion while extending rates for the rich, too, would cost $700 billion more; together the nearly $4 trillion is more than half the debt projected in the decade to 2020.

Many Democrats, backed by a wide range of economists, say that with unemployment stuck at nearly 10 percent, more stimulus spending is needed — for the unemployed, struggling states and cities and job-creating public works projects — before focusing on deficits. The fiscal commission is considering delaying any deficit-reduction proposals until perhaps 2012.

Democrats are also split on fixing Social Security’s long-term solvency. Mr. Obama had wanted to tackle the issue early, and he created the debt commission by executive order — after Senate Republicans blocked legislation — partly in the hope that it would propose future benefit and payroll tax changes he could embrace. Some Democrats say he will have all the more reason to lead that charge after the elections, to signal a more centrist, fiscally conservative course. Yet liberal groups have already formed a big coalition to lobby against any such move.

What could result is “deficit reduction by gridlock,” said John Podesta, the president of the progressive Center for American Progress and a chief of staff in the Clinton White House.

That would be the outcome if Republicans, as expected, block additional unemployment aid and if the parties deadlock in the lame-duck session over pending appropriations and the Bush tax cuts that expire Dec. 31. That would leave lower spending levels in place for the fiscal year 2011 and force Mr. Obama and Republicans to try to reach a tax compromise next year.

But that sort of immediate deficit reduction, said Robert Greenstein, the founder of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “will hurt the economy more than help it without doing very much to deal with the long-term problem, which is where the real issue is.”

    Divide on U.S. Deficit Likely to Grow After Election, NYT, 25.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/politics/26fiscal.html

In Colorado, Voters Voice Uncertainty and Anger

October 24, 2010
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

LOVELAND, Colo. — That Americans are angry and anxious heading toward the Nov. 2 elections has become a truism, an assumption built into candidate calculations from the lowest local alderman on up. Plot a voter’s place on the rage scale, and voilà, out pops a prediction of the expected anti-Democrat, or anti-establishment, backlash.

Voters like Daryl Pike have a different word for it: lost.

“Everything is fractured,” said Mr. Pike, 63, a roofing salesman and lifelong Democrat from this city in northern Colorado.

Mr. Pike said he felt that the country was on an uncharted course, economically and politically. That belief has torn him from the moorings of loyalty that he felt for decades to the Democrats. There is not one on the ballot in Colorado he really likes, he said. But he is not sure he’s quite ready to vote for a Republican, either. “I have no idea what I’m going to do,” he said.

In dozens of interviews in Loveland and across Larimer County, a similar conclusion emerged time and again: uncertainty or trepidation about the future — with the election simply an expression of those deeper currents.

On issues from the economy to the state of democracy, many people described themselves as out to sea and adrift. Some said they feared that lost jobs might never return. Others were clinging more tightly than ever to the things they thought worth fighting for: family, school, church.

That diffuse, hard-to-pin-down mood — despairing or resolute, and, yes, sometimes simply angry — will be transmuted into the black-or-white binary code of win or lose on Election Day. And Larimer will be pivotal to the outcome. Hard-fought races rage across this state, from governor to United States Senate, to seven seats in the House of Representatives, and this swing county an hour north of Denver — historically Republican, recently more mixed — could help decide the final tilt.

Though Republicans are widely expected to make big national gains, interviews and polls confirm that Americans are not ideologically driven any more now than they were when they made history and elected Barack Obama president in 2008.

What they want is reassurance — a steady hand holding the helm in a direction that seems sure and true. Anger, people here said, is just insecurity tied in knots.

 

Uncharted Waters

Volatility and a kind of jumpy inclination against party fealty is easy to find in Larimer, with many people saying they plan to vote Republican in one race, Democratic in the next, while leaving some lines blank if they have come to detest all sides. A predictable surge in one direction? Maybe not.

Rachel Howes, for example, a 29-year-old dental hygienist in Fort Collins, the county’s largest city, said she planned to vote mostly for Democrats, except in the governor’s race, where she likes a conservative third-party candidate, Tom Tancredo, a former congressman. She opposes tax measures that would increase school financing, though she has children in public school.

Her measure of stability and how good to feel about the world is her husband’s job as a carpenter.

“He’s not finding work,” she said.

Or consider James Cherry — no handy label for him either. He is a structural engineer and an unaffiliated voter who leans, he said, toward the Republicans on gun rights and abortion.

But he is also heavily involved in philanthropy, and the federal health care overhaul passed by the Democrats touches on his passions about caring for others. He enthusiastically supported the change and has no patience for Republicans or Tea Party enthusiasts who want repeal. Indeed, he is unhappy with both parties that the law does not include a single-payer government option that liberal Democrats had favored. His wife, Julia, is on the same page.

“I’ve always volunteered for those underserved who don’t have a voice,” she said.

A former mayor of Fort Collins, Ed Stoner, a Republican, said he would vote mostly for Democrats — including Betsy Markey for the local Congressional seat — but abstain from the United States Senate race between Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and his challenger, Ken Buck, a Republican.

Roslyn Merrill, a stay-at-home mother, said she was so unhappy with both major party Senate candidates that she would support a third-party candidate.

Larimer County itself seems in transition to an uncertain place. The collapse of the dot-com bubble around 2000 hit the county hard, with its concentration of tech jobs, and by some measures things never returned to normal. Median income fell as the economy churned toward lower-paying employment, even before the recession.

College students, an important political constituency in 2008 in Larimer’s — and Colorado’s — shift toward the Democrats, have also been thrown a curve heading toward November.

The federal economic stimulus propped up the economy through money that flowed into Colorado State University, a dominant presence in Fort Collins. But with timing that creates its own pre-election wild card, the university said earlier this month that dwindling financial support could force big tuition increases.

 

News as Attack Ad

Combative, distorted, partisan information and news have been a huge factor in this election, making people like Patrick Piscani angry not just at politicians, but also at the system itself that has cranked and whirred its machinery to reach him.

Colorado’s Senate race alone ranked first in the nation as of last week in the flood of money from outside groups, with more than $23 million spent mostly for attack ads, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks campaign spending. Three close Congressional races, including the Fourth District here in Larimer County, drew $6.7 million more among them, mostly again to pay for invective.

“If I were to base it on what I’ve heard up until now, I wouldn’t vote for anybody — it’s been horrible,” Mr. Piscani said.

Mr. Piscani, 54, has been on his own journey through changing times, and that also affects where he stands. He became a street vendor in Fort Collins last year after a downsizing at the payroll processing company where he worked as a manager, and is now completing his first full season selling Italian sausages, bratwursts and other delicacies in the city’s Old Town section.

“When the economy is down, this kind of food gets more popular,” he said as he prepared his cart — P. J.’s Curbside Grill — for business on a recent morning. He is not sure yet whether life as a lunchtime entrepreneur will be an interlude or a permanent change. But on a crisp, sunny October day at least, Mr. Piscani said, it beats being behind a desk.

“I’ll know by the end of the year whether this works,” he said. “If it doesn’t then I’ll crank up the résumé.”

Mr. Piscani’s sense of the economy as a mysterious black box of unknowns, his very livelihood a barometer of tough times, spills into his view of politics. The fusillades of television attack ads, he said, especially in the Senate race, have left him angry, confused and unable to decide. He will vote, he said, but based solely on reading and research between now and the election. The ads, he said, are tuned out.

Matt Rodriguez, 27, a maintenance technician in Fort Collins, said the bombardment of conflicting information was bad enough to paralyze him with indecision too. What’s worse, he said, is that his friends parrot information from the ads that he does not believe is true.

“Everybody is butting heads,” he said.

Bob Moore, 50, the executive editor of the local newspaper, The Coloradoan, said he thought that politics in Larimer County had been “nationalized” by those outside interests and by the fact that people are paying less attention to hometown news coverage. As at most newspapers, circulation at The Coloradoan has fallen and the staff has been cut.

“The personality that should be in a local race gets obliterated and you just have the Democrat and the Republican — you don’t have Betsy Markey and Cory Gardner,” Mr. Moore said.

 

Changing Views

Beattie Elementary School, in a leafy neighborhood of Fort Collins, has cut its staff seven years out of the last nine as enrollment has fallen. The school may close entirely next year under a districtwide reorganization of underutilized schools.

“Those red dots — you don’t want to get those,” said the principal, Sam Aldern, sitting in his office showing a reporter the district’s assessment sheet of demographic and economic health. “We got four out of five.”

Beattie’s crisis has drawn in parents to be part of the discussion of what comes next, including Deb Tucker, a committed Democrat, and Tara Kropp, a stalwart Republican. Their participation brought them together as friends, they said, and then changed their views, subtly and differently.

What unites them, they said, is most important: a passionate and vehement opposition to the mania for tax cuts that they fear is sweeping the county, and Colorado. Two proposals on the state ballot, in particular, would devastate local education with spending caps or borrowing limits, the women say. Two measures to increase school financing are also on the local ballot in Fort Collins and face an uncertain fate.

“What’s important is funding the schools, and if that increases my taxes, then that increases my taxes,” said Ms. Kropp, 36, a mother of four who plans to vote a Republican ticket except for Mr. Buck in the Senate race, who she believes has shifted his position on abortion for political reasons and therefore cannot be trusted.

Ms. Tucker, 33, who has a daughter and son at Beattie — where she went to school herself, and had Mr. Aldern as a teacher before he became principal — said school involvement had heightened her belief that individuals could make a difference. She plans to vote a straight Democratic ticket.

“I think planning the closure of a school that’s been open 30-plus years puts a pretty big spin on things,” Ms. Tucker said. “It makes you much more passionate.”

Ms. Kropp added, “And you talk to more people with different views from your own.”

Ms. Kropp said she had come to feel more cynical about politicians than she used to, particularly those who support tax cuts but do not talk about the potential impacts.

“I guess I’m jaded now,” she said. “They just talk pretty.”

 

Alone and at Sea

Erica Michel is a one-woman economic index.

Before the recession, she was juggling two small businesses in Fort Collins, a day care service she did herself and a tanning salon, started by her parents, in a strip mall near the Colorado State campus. Her husband, Brian, managed a local auto-lube shop.

Now, she said, it is all undone. She put the salon up for sale last year after Mr. Michel lost his job. The day care business died when her primary clients moved away a few months ago. In a spot of good news, two employees at the salon — 2010 Colorado State graduates whose job searches had been going nowhere — recently landed better jobs, but that has left her alone at the shop, Sunset Beach Tanning, as the last full-time employee.

“I’m not the small business they talk about, I’m the small, small business,” she said, referring to politicians’ odes to small business.

Ms. Michel, 36, said that she already leaned toward the Republicans, but that the fine print of the federal health care overhaul pushed her into full embrace; the new law imposed a 10 percent surcharge on ultraviolet tanning.

“Someone called the other day asking if I was supporting Markey,” Ms. Michel said. “I said, ‘Did she support the tanning tax?’ ”

The caller did not know about a tanning tax, but called back to say yes, it was in the health care bill that Ms. Markey supported. “Then I said, ‘No I won’t be supporting her.’ ”

Mr. Michel, who has been commuting 150 miles a day to a job he found near Denver, also plans to vote Republican.

Ms. Michel said the deeper wellspring of her mood is that she simply did not see things getting better. Her fears are mirrored nationally. Two-thirds of Americans in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in August said they were not confident that life for the next generation would be better, up nine percentage points since June 2009.

Ms. Michel and her husband have been thinking lately that life in a smaller town, maybe in Nebraska where Mr. Michel has relatives, could be a good move.

“Life would be so much simpler in Nebraska,” she said.

Dalia Sussman contributed research.

    In Colorado, Voters Voice Uncertainty and Anger, NYT, 24.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/us/politics/25mood.html

Pro-Republican Groups Prepare Big Push at End of Races

October 24, 2010
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

OVIEDO, Fla. — The anonymously financed conservative groups that have played such a crucial role this campaign year are starting a carefully coordinated final push to deliver control of Congress to Republicans, shifting money among some 80 House races they are monitoring day by day.

Officials involved in the effort over the midterm elections’ final week say it is being spearheaded by a core subset of the largest outside conservative groups, which have millions of dollars left to spend on television advertisements, mailings and phone calls for five potentially decisive Senate races, as well as the scores of House races.

Bolstered by a surge in last-minute donations and other financial support, outside liberal groups and unions say they are stepping up their response in advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, but remain largely outgunned by the scale and sophistication of the operation supporting Republican candidates.

A vivid picture of how outside groups are helping Republicans across the country can be found here in central Florida. The incumbent Democrat, Representative Suzanne M. Kosmas, had a nearly four-to-one fund-raising advantage over her Republican challenger, State Representative Sandy Adams, at the end of September.

Ms. Adams, low on cash, has not run a single campaign commercial. But a host of outside groups have swept in to swamp Ms. Kosmas with attack ads, helping establish Ms. Adams as the favorite without her having to spend on television.

Many of the conservative groups say they have been trading information through weekly strategy sessions and regular conference calls. They have divided up races to avoid duplication, the groups say, and to ensure that their money is spread around to put Democrats on the defensive in as many districts and states as possible — and, more important, lock in whatever gains they have delivered for the Republicans so far.

“We carpet-bombed for two months in 82 races, now it’s sniper time,” said Rob Collins, president of American Action Network, which is one of the leading Republican groups this campaign season and whose chief executive is Norm Coleman, the former senator from Minnesota. “You’re looking at the battle field and saying, ‘Where can we marginally push — where can we close a few places out?’ ”

Democrats said the conservative groups were upending some of their best-laid plans in several important races, like here in Florida, especially those in which they had been counting on the financial advantages their candidates had over lesser-financed Republicans at the beginning of the general election.

Filings with the Federal Election Commission over the weekend show that one Republican group, American Future Fund, has purchased more television advertisements attacking Representative Bruce Braley, Democrat of Iowa, who was expecting an easier path to re-election. Another group, the 60 Plus Association, reported spending more than $150,000 against Representative Solomon P. Ortiz, Democrat of Texas, who has been considered a likely victor in November against his cash-short challenger, Blake Farenthold.

“As you know, they have been dumping tens of millions of dollars of secret money into these campaigns,” Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview. “I would say the outside groups have shuffled the deck in a number of these races.”

The coordinating effort is led out of a nondescript office suite just blocks from the White House, where two groups formed with help from Karl Rove — American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS — share space with American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. Together those strategists had already committed nearly $45 million for advertisements among them, according to Democratic advertising monitors’ best estimates. That does not include millions more being spent to get voters to polls through mailings, phone calls and text messages.

Their office suite — which has been deluged with incoming messages from nervous donors asking for progress reports or offering advice — is also the site of the weekly strategy sessions, which have up to roughly 25 representatives from other Republican groups active this campaign season, participants say.

A secondary hub is in Alexandria, Va., at the office of the Crossroads groups’ political director, Carl Forti, a protégé of Mr. Rove’s whose company does communications consulting for Americans for Jobs Security and the 60 Plus Association, which have spent more than $12 million between them this election cycle.

Working from color-coded master spreadsheets — one of which was obtained by The New York Times — the conservative groups are now closely monitoring polling in 80 House races that they judge crucial to ensuring a Republican majority. Based on those results, the groups have started to place their final advertising bets in ways carefully coordinated to fill openings left by the more financially limited official party and candidate committees.

In several cases, officials with the outside groups said, they intend to force Democrats to spend money in districts they presumed safe; in others, they said they would wipe out financial advantages Democratic incumbents were counting on to stave off strong challenges from underfinanced opponents.

“We’re going to continue to have a very strong presence on the Senate and in each of the key House races where we’ve played a big role,” said Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS.

The groups, he said, are planning “an expansion of that effort, where we see holes and gaps.”

Over all, they said, their moves are most acutely focused on those races determined to be the most critical in securing Republican Congressional control, rather than on tantalizing but long-shot attempts to defeat Democratic nemeses like Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

Both sides reported seeing an influx of new spending by liberal outside groups that had generally been subdued until now — a late-stage cavalry effect that Mr. Law called “alarming from my vantage point,” though he wondered if it was coming a bit late.

A group called Women’s Voices Women Vote recently began a significant advertising campaign against Ken Buck in Colorado, the Republican challenger to Senator Michael Bennet; Commonsense Ten, a liberal group that had been mostly focused on Senate races, has started a new advertising campaign to help Mr. Braley of Iowa.

“It’s clear that both institutional donors and individual donors dug deep over the last two or three weeks, and it will make a difference for sure,” said Jim Jordan, a strategist with Commonsense Ten. “But when we look back at the totality of it all we will still be outspent on electronic media six- or seven-to-one.”

In Florida, a review of records at the local NBC affiliate, WESH, shows that a succession of outside groups bought time for waves of anti-Kosmas advertisements, an anonymous, attack-ad relay race.

“They are not required to disclose who they are,” Ms. Kosmas said. “Therefore it’s impossible to connect them to their real agenda.”

Mr. Van Hollen sought to attach any Republican success on Election Day to the corporate benefactors backing the groups. “They are going to be very much indebted to these special interest groups that have come into these races,” he said.

In an e-mail, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, accused Mr. Van Hollen of focusing on the anonymous donors as a way to “distract voters with scare tactics and side topics” rather than issues like jobs.

He added, “We appreciate the lawful work of any organization that is committed to working towards our goal of retiring Nancy Pelosi,” the House speaker.

    Pro-Republican Groups Prepare Big Push at End of Races, NYT, 24.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/us/politics/25groups.html

Groups Push Legal Limits in Advertising

October 17, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

A recent television commercial sponsored by an Iowa-based nonprofit group, American Future Fund, attacking Representative Bobby Bright, an Alabama Democrat, could hardly have been more explicit in its closing: “On Election Day,” the narrator said, “take the right path. Vote against Bobby Bright.”

Such a direct appeal to voters might seem unremarkable, but actually it is an example of an important new tool afforded to outside interest groups that is reshaping the contours of this year’s midterm elections.

Before the Supreme Court’s landmark campaign finance ruling in January, nonprofit groups like American Future Fund, able to accept unrestricted contributions from individuals and corporations, had been limited to broadcasting “issue ads” and barred from “express advocacy,” advertisements that directly urge voters to elect or defeat specific candidates.

Now, in the aftermath of the court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, third-party groups in growing numbers have been flocking to this sharper form of messaging in the closing weeks of the campaign.

In the process, however, the groups are, as never before, pushing the legal limits that enable them to preserve the anonymity of their donors. They are doing so just as Democratic officials and campaign finance watchdogs — alarmed by the gushers of secret money pouring into races, largely in favor of Republicans — have stepped up their calls for investigations by regulators.

The basic rule of thumb for nonprofit groups organized under Section 501(c) of the tax code is that more than 50 percent of their annual activities cannot be political. Although it is a matter of debate how spending on traditional issue ads would be categorized by the Internal Revenue Service, it is indisputable that spending on express advocacy would be classified as political.

An analysis by The New York Times of data provided by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political and issue-related advertising, found at least two major Republican-leaning groups, the American Future Fund and the 60 Plus Association, which bills itself as a conservative alternative to AARP, have now devoted more than half of their spending this year on television advertising for express advocacy.

Other organizations, including Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit group tied to Karl Rove, and Americans for Job Security, a Republican-oriented trade association, have been flirting relatively close to that threshold as well.

Even operating just under that dividing line, however, does not mean they are safe, because it is possible the I.R.S., in particular, could classify many of their issue ads as political too, Democratic and Republican campaign finance lawyers said.

“I think engaging in full-blown express advocacy is aggressive,” said Michael Toner, a lawyer at Bryan Cave and a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “It’s aggressive because you have to concede at least some of what you’re doing is political. Then it is a battle of how everything else is going to be defined.”

He added: “It reduces your margin for error.”

Marc Elias, a campaign finance lawyer at Perkins Coie whose clients include Democratic candidates and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was blunter about the risks for the groups.

“They need to basically pull an inside straight to stay within the law,” he said. “They need to argue every one of those issue ads needs to wind up nonpolitical, which seems to be a Herculean task.”

A thorough audit would require examining all types of outlays by an organization, including, for example, radio advertisements and direct mail. Television advertising, however, usually accounts for the bulk of the spending by these groups.

It is possible that the groups will seek to stay under the 50 percent limit by increasing their nonpolitical spending after the election is over, a common tactic. They may, for example, broadcast a lot of advertisements during the lame-duck Congress.

The strategy can be risky, however, because it depends on organizations’ keeping money in reserve, or being able to raise enough money for such work after the election.

In the case of the 60 Plus Association, it has spent $3.7 million on television time for express advocacy ads, or more than 86 percent of its total. Tom Kise, a spokesman, challenged the completeness of the advertising figures but also said the organization had spent heavily on grassroots lobbying and other activities that balance out its political spending.

The group has also been filing with the I.R.S. based on a fiscal year, instead of the calendar year, so it may have until July 2011 to get its ledgers in order.

American Future Fund, set up by a cadre of Republican political operatives, has devoted $3 million, or about 56 percent of its television advertising spending, to express advocacy.

Meanwhile, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Job Security have been more conservative, keeping their express advocacy spending on television to roughly 40 percent.

Several lawyers said that while the 50 percent limit is widely cited, the I.R.S. has never explicitly ruled that 50 percent is the official limit for political spending. It could, in fact, be less.

Under the law, nonprofit 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, 501(c)(5) labor unions and 501(c)(6) trade associations are supposed to be primarily focused on those tax-exempt purposes, as opposed to influencing elections. The crucial question is how a group’s “primary purpose” is evaluated. Some tax lawyers advise their clients to keep their political spending to less than 40 percent of their budgets.

Another surprisingly murky issue is what, other than explicit appeals to voters about how they should cast their ballots, the I.R.S. actually considers political. Auditors weigh a host of factors, according to the agency, including whether an advertisement is part of a continuing series by the group on the same issue. If it is, the group could make a stronger case that the ad is an example of issue, not political, advocacy.

Most casual observers, however, would probably consider many of the issue ads by these groups to be very much political. They attack or praise candidates, just like straight political advertisements, but they invariably add a tag line that urges voters to do something other than vote for or against candidates. A recent commercial by Crossroads GPS, criticizing Representative Joe Sestak, who is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, ends by urging viewers, “Tell Congressman Sestak, ‘Stop the Medicare cuts,’ ” and displays his phone number.

Some pro-Republican groups, for legal or tactical reasons, have continued to script all of their commercials as issue ads, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity, a group linked to the billionaire David Koch.

Problems with the I.R.S. could lead to tax penalties and revocation of tax-exempt status. But nonprofit groups engaging heavily in express advocacy could also run into issues with the Federal Election Commission. If the commission determines that a group’s “major purpose” is political, the group is required to register as a political committee and disclose its donors.

The commission’s three Republican members, however, are generally inclined to give these groups leeway, effectively deadlocking the commission because it is split along party lines, and a majority vote is required for it to act. But if most of a group’s spending seems to be on express advocacy, even the Republican commissioners would probably have to scrutinize the group, lawyers said.

    Groups Push Legal Limits in Advertising, NYT, 17.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/politics/18express.html

The Paralysis of the State

October 12, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

Sometimes a local issue perfectly illuminates a larger national problem. Such is the case with the opposition of the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, to construction of a new tunnel between his state and New York.

Christie argues that a state that is currently facing multibillion-dollar annual deficits cannot afford a huge new spending project that is already looking to be $5 billion overbudget. His critics argue that this tunnel is exactly the sort of infrastructure project that New Jersey needs if it’s to prosper in the decades ahead.

Both sides are right. But what nobody seems to be asking is: Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don’t.

The answer is what Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal once called demosclerosis. Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.

Daniel DiSalvo, a political scientist at the City College of New York, has a superb survey of the problem in the new issue of National Affairs. DiSalvo notes that nationally, state and local workers earn on average $14 more per hour in wages and benefits than their private sector counterparts. A city like Buffalo has as many public workers as it did in 1950, even though it has lost half its population.

These arrangements grew gradually. Through much of the 20th century, staunch liberals like Franklin Roosevelt opposed public sector unions. George Meany of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argued that it is “impossible to bargain collectively with government.”

Private sector managers have to compete in the marketplace, so they have an incentive to push back against union requests. Ideally, some balance is found between the needs of workers and companies. Government managers possess a monopoly on their services and have little incentive to resist union demands. It would only make them unpopular.

In addition, public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product. DiSalvo notes that between 1989 ad 2004, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was the biggest spender in American politics, giving $40 million to federal candidates. The largest impact is on low-turnout local elections. The California prison guard union recently sent a signal by spending $200,000 to defeat a state assemblyman who had tried to reduce costs.

In states across the country, elected leaders raise state employee salaries in the fat years and then are careful to placate the unions by raising future pension benefits in the lean ones. Even if cost-conscious leaders are elected, they find their hands tied by pension commitments and employee contracts.

The end result is sclerotic government. Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure. The party believes in the positive uses of government. But if you want the country to share that belief, you have to provide a government that is nimble, tough-minded and effective. That means occasionally standing up to the excessive demands of public employee unions. Instead of standing up to those demands, the party has become captured by the unions. Liberal activism has become paralyzed by its own special interests.

The antigovernment-types perpetually cry less, less, less. The loudest liberals cry more, more, more. Someday there will be a political movement that is willing to make choices, that is willing to say “this but not that.”

Someday.

    The Paralysis of the State, NYT, 12.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html

Clean and Open American Elections

October 5, 2010
The New York Times
 

For at least 44 years, it has been illegal for foreign corporations, countries and individuals to make political contributions in the United States for any election, either directly or indirectly. It is even against the law to solicit such contributions. But in this Wild West year of political money, that longstanding ban is being set aside. The United States Chamber of Commerce — one of the biggest advertisers in midterm races around the country — is actively soliciting foreign money, and government enforcers seem to be doing nothing to stop it.

According to a report issued Tuesday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, the chamber is getting “dues” payments of tens of thousands of dollars from foreign companies in countries such as Bahrain, India and Egypt, and then mingling the money with its fund to advocate for or against candidates in the midterm races.

The chamber firmly denies the charge, saying its internal accounting rules prevent any foreign money from being used for political purposes. Money, however, is fungible, and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.

The chamber has vowed to spend more than $75 million before the November election, and it has already run 8,000 ads, most of which support Republican candidates. The ads do not urge a vote for or against a specific candidate, but when they accuse Senator Barbara Boxer of California of “destroying jobs,” or call Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut “the worst attorney general in the nation,” no one can mistake the intent. (The two candidates, both Democrats, are in tight Senate races.)

Because the United States Chamber is organized as a 501(c)(6) business league under the federal tax code, it does not have to disclose its donors, so the full extent of foreign influence on its political agenda is unknown. But Tuesday’s report sheds light on how it raises money abroad. Its affiliate in Abu Dhabi, for example, the American Chamber of Commerce, says it has more than 450 corporate and individual members in the United Arab Emirates who pay as much as $8,500 a year to join.

Because of a series of court decisions that culminated in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling earlier this year, these and similar 501(c) nonprofits have become huge players in the year’s election, using unlimited money from donors who have no fear of disclosure. (Not surprisingly, the chamber has been a leading opponent of legislation to require disclosure.) One such group, American Crossroads, organized by Karl Rove, announced on Tuesday a $4.2 million ad buy to support Republican candidates, bringing the group’s total spending to about $18 million so far.

The possible commingling of secret foreign money into these groups raises fresh questions about whether they are violating both the letter and spirit of the campaign finance laws. The Federal Election Commission, which has been rendered toothless by its Republican members, should be investigating possible outright violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act by foreign companies and the chamber.

The Internal Revenue Service, which is supposed to ensure that these nonprofit groups are not primarily political, has fallen down on the job. Last week, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, demanded that the I.R.S. look into whether the tax code was being misused for political purposes, and, on Tuesday, two watchdog groups made the same request of the agency.

The government needs to make sure that the tax code — and American control of American elections — is not being violated.

    Clean and Open American Elections, NYT, 5.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/opinion/06wed1.html

As Rules Shift, Donor Names Stay Secret

September 20, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and STEPHANIE STROM

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies would certainly seem to the casual observer to be a political organization: Karl Rove, a political adviser to President George W. Bush, helped raise money for it; the group is run by a cadre of experienced political hands; it has spent millions of dollars on television commercials attacking Democrats in key Senate races across the country.

Yet the Republican operatives who created the group earlier this year set it up as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, so its primary purpose, by law, is not supposed to be political.

The rule of thumb, in fact, is that more than 50 percent of a 501(c)(4)’s activities cannot be political. But that has not stopped Crossroads and a raft of other nonprofit advocacy groups like it — mostly on the Republican side, so far — from becoming some of the biggest players in this year’s midterm elections, in part because of the anonymity they afford donors, prompting outcries from campaign finance watchdogs.

The chances, however, that the flotilla of groups will draw much legal scrutiny for their campaign activities seem slim, because the organizations, which have been growing in popularity as conduits for large, unrestricted donations among both Republicans and Democrats since the 2006 election, fall into something of a regulatory netherworld.

Neither the Internal Revenue Service, which has jurisdiction over nonprofits, nor the Federal Election Commission, which regulates the financing of federal races, appears likely to examine them closely, according to campaign finance watchdogs, lawyers who specialize in the field and current and former federal officials.

A revamped regulatory landscape this year has elevated the attractiveness to political operatives of groups like Crossroads and others, organized under the auspices of Section 501(c) of the tax code. Unlike so-called 527 political organizations, which can also accept donations of unlimited size, 501(c) groups have the advantage of usually not having to disclose their donors’ identity.

This is arguably more important than ever after the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case earlier this year that eased restrictions on corporate spending on campaigns.

Interviews with a half-dozen campaign finance lawyers yielded an anecdotal portrait of corporate political spending since the Citizens United decision. They agreed that most prominent, publicly traded companies are staying on the sidelines.

But other companies, mostly privately held, and often small to medium size, are jumping in, mainly on the Republican side. Almost all of them are doing so through 501(c) organizations, as opposed to directly sponsoring advertisements themselves, the lawyers said.

“I can tell you from personal experience, the money’s flowing,” said Michael E. Toner, a former Republican F.E.C. commissioner, now in private practice at the firm Bryan Cave.

The growing popularity of the groups is making the gaps in oversight of them increasingly worrisome among those mindful of the influence of money on politics.

“The Supreme Court has completely lifted restrictions on corporate spending on elections,” said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, a watchdog group. “And 501(c) serves as a haven for these front groups to run electioneering ads and keep their donors completely secret.”

Almost all of the biggest players among third-party groups, in terms of buying television time in House and Senate races since August, have been 501(c) organizations, and their purchases have heavily favored Republicans, according to data from Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.

They include 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, like Crossroads, which has been the top spender on Senate races, and Americans for Prosperity, another pro-Republican group that has been the leader on the House side; 501(c)(5) labor unions, which have been supporting Democrats; and 501(c)(6) trade associations, like the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has been spending heavily in support of Republicans.

Charities organized under Section 501(c)(3) are largely prohibited from political activity because they offer their donors tax deductibility.

Campaign finance watchdogs have raised the most questions about the political activities of the “social welfare” organizations. The burden of monitoring such groups falls in large part on the I.R.S. But lawyers, campaign finance watchdogs and former I.R.S. officials say the agency has had little incentive to police the groups because the revenue-collecting potential is small, and because its main function is not to oversee the integrity of elections.

The I.R.S. division with oversight of tax-exempt organizations “is understaffed, underfunded and operating under a tax system designed to collect taxes, not as a regulatory mechanism,” said Marcus S. Owens, a lawyer who once led that unit and now works for Caplin & Drysdale, a law firm popular with liberals seeking to set up nonprofit groups.

In fact, the I.R.S. is unlikely to know that some of these groups exist until well after the election because they are not required to seek the agency’s approval until they file their first tax forms — more than a year after they begin activity.

“These groups are popping up like mushrooms after a rain right now, and many of them will be out of business by late November,” Mr. Owens said. “Technically, they would have until January 2012 at the earliest to file anything with the I.R.S. It’s a farce.”

A report by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration this year revealed that the I.R.S. was not even reviewing the required filings of 527 groups, which have increasingly been supplanted by 501(c)(4) organizations.

Social welfare nonprofits are permitted to do an unlimited amount of lobbying on issues related to their primary purpose, but there are limits on campaigning for or against specific candidates.

I.R.S. officials cautioned that what may seem like political activity to the average lay person might not be considered as such under the agency’s legal criteria.

“Federal tax law specifically distinguishes among activities to influence legislation through lobbying, to support or oppose a specific candidate for election and to do general advocacy to influence public opinion on issues,” said Sarah Hall Ingram, commissioner of the I.R.S. division that oversees nonprofits. As a result, rarely do advertisements by 501(c)(4) groups explicitly call for the election or defeat of candidates. Instead, they typically attack their positions on issues.

Steven Law, president of Crossroads GPS, said what distinguished the group from its sister organization, American Crossroads, which is registered with the F.E.C. as a political committee, was that Crossroads GPS was focused over the longer term on advocating on “a suite of issues that are likely to see some sort of legislative response. ” American Crossroads’ efforts are geared toward results in this year’s elections, Mr. Law said.

Since August, however, Crossroads GPS has spent far more on television advertising on Senate races than American Crossroads, which must disclose its donors.

The elections commission could, theoretically, step in and rule that groups like Crossroads GPS should register as political committees, which would force them to disclose their donors. But that is unlikely because of the current make-up of the commission and the regulatory environment, campaign finance lawyers and watchdog groups said. Four out of six commissioners are needed to order an investigation of a group. But the three Republican commissioners are inclined to give these groups leeway.

Donald F. McGahn, a Republican commissioner, said the current commission and the way the Republican members, in particular, read the case law, gave such groups “quite a bit of latitude.”

    As Rules Shift, Donor Names Stay Secret, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/us/politics/21money.html

The Secret Election

September 18, 2010
The New York Times

For all the headlines about the Tea Party and blind voter anger, the most disturbing story of this year’s election is embodied in an odd combination of numbers and letters: 501(c)(4). That is the legal designation for the advocacy committees that are sucking in many millions of anonymous corporate dollars, making this the most secretive election cycle since the Watergate years.

As Michael Luo reported in The Times last week, the battle for Congress is largely being financed by a small corps of wealthy individuals and corporations whose names may never be known to the public. And the full brunt of that spending — most of it going to Republican candidates — has yet to be felt in this campaign.

Corporations got the power to pour anonymous money into elections from Supreme Court and Federal Election Commission decisions in the last two years, culminating in the Citizens United opinion earlier this year. The effect is drastic: In 2004 and 2006, virtually all independent groups receiving electioneering donations revealed their donors. In 2008, less than half of the groups reported their donors, according to a study issued last week by the watchdog group Public Citizen. So far this year, only 32 percent of the groups have done so.

Most of the cash has gone to Republican operatives like Karl Rove who have set up tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations. In theory, these groups, with disingenuously innocuous names like American Crossroads and the American Action Network, are meant to promote social welfare. The value to the political operatives is that they are a funnel for anonymous campaign donations.

Mr. Rove’s group, American Crossroads, hopes to spend $50 million, and is already advertising against Democratic candidates in California, Pennsylvania, Nevada and other states. The American Action Network, led by Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota, is spending $25 million, and has been blasting the Democratic senators Patty Murray in Washington and Russell Feingold in Wisconsin.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, still boiling over its failure to stop health care reform, is spending $75 million to defeat the lawmakers who approved it. Their donors need not be revealed. (Labor unions are trying to do the same thing for Democrats, but cannot raise nearly as much money.)

The new secrecy era began with the 2007 Supreme Court decision in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, which tore away federal restrictions on corporate and union political spending in the weeks just before an election. The F.E.C. interpreted that decision to mean that unless an ad explicitly said “elect John Doe” (as if that matters), corporate donors did not have to be disclosed.

Then the Citizens United decision fully legalized such donations under the First Amendment. That new protection has led to the flourishing of the (c)(4) groups, which know they will not be investigated by a deadlocked F.E.C. or an Internal Revenue Service that has bigger issues to deal with.

The Citizens United decision, paradoxically, supported greater disclosure of donors, but Senate Republicans have filibustered a bill that would eliminate the secrecy shield. Just one vote is preventing passage. That act is coming back for another Senate vote. The two Republican senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, might want to read a recent poll by the Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, which showed that 80 percent of the state’s voters support public disclosure.

It is too late for a new law to have any effect on the dark swamp of this year’s elections, but there is still hope that Congress will allow the sun to shine on the elections of 2012 and beyond.

    The Secret Election,  NYT, 18.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19sun1.html

Paladino Stuns N.Y. G.O.P. With Victory

September 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and MICHAEL BARBARO

Carl P. Paladino, a Buffalo multimillionaire who jolted the Republican Party with his bluster and belligerence, rode a wave of disgust with Albany to the nomination for governor of New York on Tuesday, toppling Rick A. Lazio, a former congressman who earned establishment support but inspired little popular enthusiasm.

Mr. Paladino became one of the first Tea Party candidates to win a Republican primary for governor, in a state where the Republican Party has historically succeeded by choosing moderates.

The result was a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans. It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”

Yet Mr. Paladino, 64, energized Tea Party advocates and social conservatives with white-hot rhetoric and a damn-the-establishment attitude, promising to “take a baseball bat to Albany” to dislodge the state’s entrenched political class. He also outspent Mr. Lazio, pouring more than $3 million of his fortune into the race, while Mr. Lazio spent just over $2 million.

“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.”

Referring to criticism from what he said were liberal elites, he added: “They say I am too blunt. Well, I am, and I don’t apologize for it. They say I am an angry man, and that’s true. We are all angry.”

Mr. Paladino, a first-time candidate who roamed the state with a pit bull named Duke and stayed late after campaign events to hug supporters, swamped Mr. Lazio by a ratio of nearly two to one, lifted by strong showings in Erie and Niagara Counties, where his message of economic populism was especially resonant.

His defeat of Mr. Lazio, 52, raises the possibility of a lopsided general election contest with Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who has amassed a $24 million war chest and whose commanding lead in the polls has lent him an air of invincibility.

Still, Mr. Paladino’s unpredictability and devil-may-care approach to campaigning, coupled with his willingness to say almost anything and to spend millions from his fortune, could pose unwelcome challenges for the exceptionally risk-averse Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Paladino’s platform calls for cutting taxes by 10 percent in six months, eliminating cherished public pensions for legislators, and using eminent domain to prevent the construction of a mosque and community center near ground zero. Those proposals could make Mr. Cuomo’s farthest-reaching reform ideas seem meek by comparison.

The sweeping agenda caught fire with Republicans, especially those far from New York City and distrustful of the party’s moderate wing.

“Grass-roots conservatives were energized in tidal wave proportions,” said former Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, an influential leader in the state party. But more moderate Republicans said they feared that Mr. Paladino’s rhetoric could alienate swing voters and independents, and doom other Republican candidates in November.

At Mr. Lazio’s election-night gathering, just after Mr. Paladino’s victory was declared on television, gloom filled the room.

“We just handed him the governorship,” said Bryan Cooper, 43, a teacher and a Republican district leader from Manhattan. “We handed Cuomo the governorship.”

The victory capped a topsy-turvy race in which the Republican state chairman, Edward F. Cox, doubting Mr. Lazio’s chances, tried to recruit a Democrat to carry the party’s banner, but then found himself outflanked by an insurgent whom he and much of the party’s leadership had denounced.

A businessman who made millions in real estate in the Buffalo area, Mr. Paladino entered the race in April and mustered only 8 percent of the party’s support at its convention in May, after reports of his e-mails drew condemnation from Republican and Democratic leaders alike.

But with Roger J. Stone Jr., the flamboyant former Nixon operative, advising him, he circumvented the party leadership, petitioned his way onto the primary ballot by collecting 30,000 signatures and quietly cobbled together a coalition of disaffected groups.

Mr. Lazio, resting on double-digit leads in polls, refused to debate Mr. Paladino, seeing no gain in giving him the exposure.

“It was a clear mistake not to engage Paladino,” said John J. Faso, the Republican nominee for governor in 2006. “He allowed Carl Paladino to speak to the voters in 30-second ads.”

Mr. Paladino unleashed a barrage of direct-mail advertisements and cable television commercials, pouring $650,000 into his campaign the first week of September, and by the weekend, one poll showed the race in a dead heat. Mr. Lazio and his allies responded with last-minute attacks on Mr. Paladino’s fitness to be governor, but by Tuesday many party insiders were wringing their hands over whether Mr. Lazio had erred by not doing more to counter Mr. Paladino earlier on.

Both candidates mounted all-out efforts to get their supporters to the polls, with Mr. Paladino relying on a huge turnout upstate.

In Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb, Darryl Radt, who described himself as a regular primary voter, said he had come to the American Legion post to vote for Mr. Paladino “because he’s mad as hell and so am I.”

Ron Wojcik, 67, a retiree, said he was frustrated with Albany and Washington and wanted someone different. “I want somebody who’s honest and hasn’t been sucked into the system already,” Mr. Wojcik said. “The system always seems to change people.”

It is not clear how quickly, if at all, Republicans will unite around Mr. Paladino. In his concession speech, Mr. Lazio, who won the nomination of the smaller but influential Conservative Party on Tuesday, fell short of embracing Mr. Paladino’s candidacy.

“I am going to be part of the public dialogue,” Mr. Lazio said as some in the crowd fought back tears. “I am going to contribute to this effort.”

Democrats on Tuesday night were already discussing ways to exploit Mr. Paladino’s vulnerabilities, and they questioned whether he could truly call himself an outsider. They noted that he was a landlord for state agencies and had poured tens of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of Democrats and Republicans in Albany.

In his victory speech, Mr. Paladino alluded to the uphill climb he faces in taking on Mr. Cuomo and repairing the state’s battered finances.

“Tomorrow morning begins the toughest part of this campaign, the longest haul, the heaviest lift, and I am going to need every single one of you,” he said to a room that was a sea of orange, his campaign’s color. “We are going to have to work harder and fight harder than we have ever fought before. We are going to rebuild New York together.”

He demanded that Mr. Cuomo meet him as an equal. “I have a message for Andrew Cuomo tonight,” Mr. Paladino said. “I challenge you to a series of debates. We have so many questions to ask you, Andrew.

“Let’s stand toe to toe in an exchange of ideas and let the people decide.”

With that, Mr. Paladino’s daughter Danielle took the microphone and led the crowd in singing “God Bless America.”


David W. Chen, Nicholas Confessore and Raymond Hernandez contributed reporting.

    Paladino Stuns N.Y. G.O.P. With Victory, NYT, 14.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/nyregion/15webnygov.html

G.O.P. Insurgents Win in Del. and N.Y.

September 14, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

The Tea Party movement scored another victory on Tuesday, helping to propel a dissident Republican, Christine O’Donnell, to an upset win over Representative Michael N. Castle in the race for the United States Senate nomination in Delaware.

Mr. Castle, a moderate who served two terms as governor and had been reliably winning elections for the last four decades, became the latest establishment Republican casualty. Republican leaders, who had actively opposed Ms. O’Donnell, said the outcome complicated the party’s chances of winning control of the Senate.

With all precincts reporting, Ms. O’Donnell won 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Castle’s 47 percent. The primary drew 57,000 voters, a small slice of the overall electorate.

Ms. O’Donnell, a former abstinence counselor who had failed in previous attempts to run for office in Delaware, won the endorsement of Sarah Palin, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and other leaders of the party’s conservative wing.

“A lot of people said we can’t win the general election; yes we can!” Ms. O’Donnell said. “It will be hard work, but we can win if those same people who fought against me work just as hard for me.”

The results on the last big night of primaries highlighted the extent to which the Tea Party movement has upended the Republican Party and underscored the volatility of the electorate seven weeks from Election Day.

In New Hampshire, another candidate with strong backing from grass-roots conservatives, Ovide Lamontagne, was locked in a tight battle with his main opponent, Kelly Ayotte, in the Republican primary for Senate.

“In the interest of making sure all the votes are counted,” Mr. Lamontagne told supporters at a rally after midnight, “we’re going to continue to wait this out.” In Delaware, Ms. O’Donnell’s victory touched off a new round of recriminations among Republicans over the direction of their party, raising the question of whether there was still room for moderates and whether the drive for ideological purity would cost the party victories in November. The state and national Republican Party had mounted an aggressive campaign to defeat Ms. O’Donnell, but it fell short, with Mr. Castle unable to rely on independent voters who have long formed his base of support.

“The voters in the Republican primary have spoken, and I respect that decision,” Mr. Castle said, addressing crestfallen supporters who gathered in Wilmington. “I had a very nice speech prepared here, hoping I would win this race.”

In Maryland, former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. won the Republican nomination for governor, positioning him for a rematch with Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who defeated him four years ago. Mr. Ehrlich defeated Brian Murphy, an investment executive, who was endorsed by Ms. Palin.

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive, won the Republican nomination for governor. He defeated Mark Neumann, a former congressman, and will face Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, a Democrat, in November.

The contests on Tuesday night were the last big cluster in a seven-month string of primaries that will come to an end when Hawaii votes on Saturday and Louisiana holds a runoff early next month. Seven members of Congress had already been defeated in their bids for re-election.

In Delaware, O’Donnell supporters who gathered at an Elks lodge in Dover began chanting “Christine! Christine!” as returns began to trickle in and her lead steadily climbed. A little more than an hour after the polls closed, the race was called for Ms. O’Donnell.

In an interview, Ms. O’Donnell said she felt confident that she would have the support of Democrats and independents (neither group could vote in Delaware’s closed Republican primary). If elected in November, she said, she would “work to repeal the health care bill.”

Throughout the campaign, Ms. O’Donnell was dogged by reports — many of them generated by members of her own party — that she had trouble with personal finances, had fudged her educational history and was not fit for office. But Ms. O’Donnell continued to rebut, repudiate and push on, with a hefty dose of help from the Tea Party infrastructure and rank-and-file voters who were furious at Washington

“I think she’s going to make it,” said Marie Bush, a supporter of Ms. O’Donnell who went to her victory rally to cheer her on. “Too many people have been slinging mud at her, and she’s a survivor.”

Asked what the candidate might do to attract independents or even Democrats, Ms. Bush said, “I think people are smart enough now to know the world we are living in is going wrong and we need people like her to make it right.”

Republicans had been counting the Delaware seat, which was vacated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as among those they believed they could use to reach a majority in the Senate. Party strategists said on Tuesday evening that they would assess the race this week, but that they would likely direct their money elsewhere — a sign that they believed that Ms. O’Donnell could not prevail in a general election. The Democratic nominee for the seat is Chris Coons, the county executive in New Castle County.

“There’s just a lot of nutty things she’s been saying that just simply don’t add up,” Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, said in a television interview on Fox News. “I’m for the Republican, but I’ve got to tell you, we were looking at eight to nine seats in the Senate. We’re now looking at seven to eight. In my opinion, this is not a race we’re going to be able to win.”

In New Hampshire, voters trickled into polling places for much of the day, with many precincts reporting average or lighter-than-expected turnout. Slow returns delayed the outcome, but just before midnight, aides to Mr. Lamontagne announced to a crowd of supporters at a Manchester restaurant that he was en route. He arrived to chants of “Ovide, Ovide,” with the Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling” blasting, though he was not yet prepared to announce victory.

Mr. Lamontagne, 52, is a lawyer in Manchester who has French-Canadian roots and is deeply involved with the Catholic Church. He is a fiscal and social conservative who opposes same-sex marriage and abortion; Democrats have consistently labeled him as “too extreme” for New Hampshire. Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Lamontagne won straw polls at Tea Party events by large margins.

He ran for governor in 1996, defeating the more moderate party favorite in the Republican primary but losing to Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who was then a state senator, in the general election. Just prior to that, Mr. Lamontagne served as chairman of the New Hampshire Board of Education for three years.

While Ms. Ayotte won Ms. Palin’s seal of approval, Mr. Lamontagne secured two other valuable endorsements: that of The Union Leader, a newspaper in Manchester, in late August, and that of Mr. DeMint of South Carolina days before the primary.

Mr. Lamontagne spent far less money than Ms. Ayotte and other candidates in the primary, but he turned heads with a set of promises that he called “Ovide’s Oath.” Those promises included doing everything possible to repeal the new federal health care law, end illegal immigration and establish term limits for members of Congress.


Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Dover, Del., and Abby Goodnough from Manchester, N.H.

    G.O.P. Insurgents Win in Del. and N.Y., NYT, 14.9.2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/politics/15elect.html

In Ad Wars, Democrats Shy From Ties to Own Party

September 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — Representative Mark Schauer of Michigan does not dwell on the legislation he has voted for during his first term in Congress, which includes the Democratic stimulus plan and health insurance overhaul. But he reminds his constituents what he has fought against, declaring, “I must ask myself 10 times a day, what is Washington thinking?”

Representative Glenn Nye of Virginia does not mention in his television advertisements that he is a Democrat. But he expresses a deep worry about the national debt, saying, “I stood up to my party leaders and voted no.”

Representative Suzanne M. Kosmas of Florida looks straight into the camera during her latest commercial and declares, “People in this district are mad, and I’m mad, too.”

The advertisements from these three vulnerable Democrats offer a window into the party’s strategy to try to keep control of the House in November at a moment when Republicans and their allies are substantially outspending Democrats and their backers.

Two years after arriving in Washington on a message of hope and change, Democratic candidates are not extolling their party’s accomplishments, but rather distancing themselves from their party’s agenda.

The midterm elections may revolve around a series of big issues, particularly with control of Congress at stake. But a look at the advertising themes and images being employed by Democrats shows all the ways they are trying to personalize their contests and avoid being defined as ideological partners of President Obama’s or as part of the Washington establishment.

In the last six weeks, Republicans have outspent Democrats $20 million to $13 million in television advertising, according to an analysis by The New York Times of 56 of the nation’s most competitive House and Senate races. The Republican advantage includes $9 million in spending from outside groups, compared with $3 million from left-leaning interests.

The disparity in spending, particularly from third-party groups, is the central reason Mr. Obama has agreed to step up his fund-raising efforts for the party in the coming weeks, aides said, and why Speaker Nancy Pelosi is asking leading donors to dig deeper.

The images of Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi appear with more frequency than those of any other political figures — but nearly always in Republican advertisements. They have been mentioned so many times that in their advertising some Democrats have started calling out their Republican rivals, including Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, who is running for the Senate.

“Congressman Roy Blunt seems to think he’s running for the Senate against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi,” says Robin Carnahan, the Democratic candidate, standing in the middle of a cow lot on her farm. “Hey Roy, you’re running against me!”

For all the evolutions in technology, with voters able to gather information instantly about candidates from an ever-widening array of sources, television advertising remains the most central ingredient of political races. Many candidates say they are buying more spots than in previous election cycles, hoping to break through to viewers who often tune out the first few times they come across a commercial.

The voices of politicians, along with soothing-sounding narrators talking about the economic stimulus, federal spending and bank bailouts, resonate from television sets throughout the morning, afternoon and evening.

In the last six weeks alone, Republicans broadcast 45,100 commercials and Democrats broadcast 38,400 in the competitive races included in the Times analysis of advertising data collected by the independent Campaign Media Analysis Group.

“The political response to a fragmented media world is to talk louder and longer,” said Evan L. Tracey, president of the group, which monitors political advertising. “This will be the most negative election we’ve probably ever seen, because everyone is trying to tap into voters on an emotional level and no one is looking to entertain right now.”

Many of the most serious and stark messages come in advertisements sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group financed in large part by David Koch, who invests millions of dollars on behalf of conservative causes. The group has focused on a handful of races, spending $1.5 million in seven competitive House seats in the last six weeks, leaving the Democratic candidates under fire at all hours of the day on television.

“To small businesses, Betsy Markey is the same as Nancy Pelosi,” a man says in one of the advertisements, referring to Representative Betsy Markey, Democrat of Colorado. For a one-week stretch in August, the group ran $40,000 worth of commercials every day against her.

In Florida, Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate for the Senate, has spent $1.1 million over the last six weeks on advertisements that are largely positive and biographical, telling the story about how he is a first-generation American of Cuban heritage. Yet in the closing moments of his spots, he says he is worried about his children’s future.

“As the son of exiles, I understand what it means to lose your country,” Mr. Rubio says. “I approve this message because we can’t afford to bankrupt ours.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada barely appears in many of his commercials. In one of his latest, he said nothing about his time as majority leader, but instead talked about milk. A dairy owner offered a testimonial that Mr. Reid “really came through for us.”

A review of hundreds of advertisements broadcast over the last six weeks found that Republicans were more than twice as likely to talk about jobs, often criticizing Democrats as not creating them. Republicans also mentioned health care far more than Democrats did. And when Democrats do bring up the issue, 38 percent of the commercials are critical of the new law.

“I’ve said no to more government spending, no to President Obama’s big health care plan and no to Wall Street bailouts,” Representative Walt Minnick, Democrat of Idaho, said in a solemn voice, sitting on the front steps of a house in jeans and shirtsleeves, looking as if he is worlds away from Washington.

The themes on display in the advertising campaigns reflect months of polling and focus groups by candidates in both parties. Democrats were twice as likely to mention financial regulation or Wall Street, according to the analysis, while Republicans mentioned the budget or government spending nearly twice as often as Democrats.

With Democrats holding a 39-seat majority in the House and Republicans 10 seats short of a Senate majority, there are more Republican candidates introducing themselves as outsiders, without the need to defend their voting records in Washington. But for the few seats where Democrats are aggressively trying to knock off a Republican incumbent, the spending argument has also been deployed.

A Democratic candidate in Nebraska’s Second District, Tom White, is urging voters to consider that Representative Lee Terry, a Republican, is to blame for the size of the debt.

“Every day, every child in America grows deep and deeper in debt, thanks to Washington politicians like Lee Terry,” said the advertisement sponsored by Mr. White, who does not mention that he is a Democrat, branding himself “Nebraska Independence for Congress.”

With early voting beginning in several states in a few weeks and with Election Day less than two months away, some of the most vulnerable Democratic candidates have turned to another approach: pleading for a second chance.

“I’ve made my share of mistakes, but they were honest mistakes, and I’ve listened to your concerns and I’ve grown on the job,” said Gov. Chet Culver of Iowa, wearing a solemn expression that gives way to a slight smile. “I hope you give us the chance.”


Amanda Cox contributed research.

    In Ad Wars, Democrats Shy From Ties to Own Party, NYT, 12.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/us/politics/13ads.html

The Agony of the Liberals

June 20, 2010
The New York Times
By ROSS DOUTHAT

They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power.

But now is the summer of their discontent. From MSNBC to “The Daily Show,” from The Huffington Post to the halls of Congress, movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama.

The catalyst was last week’s lackluster Oval Office address, but the real complaints run deeper. Many liberals look at this White House and see a presidency adrift — unable to respond effectively to the crisis in the gulf, incapable of rallying the country to great tasks like the quest for clean energy, and unwilling to do what it takes to jump-start the economy.

American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.

This is the same Barack Obama, after all, who shepherded universal health care, the dream of liberals since the days of Harry Truman (if not Thomas Paine), through several near-death experiences and finally into law. It’s the same Obama who staked the fate of the American economy on a $787 billion exercise in Keynesian pump-priming. It’s the same Obama who has done more to advance liberal priorities than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

Yet many on the left are talking as if he’s no better for liberalism than Bill Clinton circa 1996 — another compromiser, another triangulator and another disappointment.

At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined.

This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)

The second vice is an overweening faith in theory. It’s now conventional wisdom among Obama’s liberal critics that the White House has been insufficiently ambitious about deficit spending. The economy is stuck in neutral, they argue, because Obama didn’t push last year’s recovery act up over a trillion dollars, and hasn’t pressed hard enough for a second major stimulus.

Technically, they could be right — but only in the same way that it’s possible that the Iraq War would have been a ringing success if only we’d invaded with a million extra soldiers. The theory is unfalsifiable because the policy course is imaginary. Maybe in some parallel universe there’s a Congress that would be willing to borrow and spend trillions in stimulus dollars, despite record deficits, if that’s what liberal economists said the situation required. But not in this one.

Yet the liberal drumbeat continues. As Tyler Cowen wrote last week: “advocates of fiscal stimulus make it sound as simple as solving an undergraduate homework problem and ... sometimes genuinely do not realize how much the rest of the world, including politicians, views them as simply being very convinced by their own theory.” Nor do they acknowledge how much risk those same politicians have already taken on (with the first stimulus, the health care bill, and much else besides) in the name of theoretical propositions, while reaping little for their efforts save an ever-grimmer fiscal picture.

But it’s here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism.

In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It’s not that he hasn’t done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It’s that liberalism itself may be running out of time.

    The Agony of the Liberals, NYT, 20.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/opinion/21douthat-1.html

The Separation of Politics and State

June 11, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD PAINTER

Minneapolis

PRESIDENT OBAMA has made some headway in government ethics reform by imposing new restrictions on those who join his administration from the private sector, moving to exclude lobbyists from presidential boards and commissions, and suggesting legislation that might lessen the influence of corporate campaign spending on federal elections.

It’s unfortunate, then, that his White House staff remains so deeply immersed in partisan politics, as demonstrated by the administration’s offering a presidential appointment to try to dissuade Representative Joe Sestak from running in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against Senator Arlen Specter. There were similar discussions with Andrew Romanoff, a former speaker of the Colorado House, who is challenging Senator Michael Bennet.

Despite what some Republicans might claim, such politicking is not illegal; in fact, this sort of thing has been business as usual in presidential administrations for a very long time. Nonetheless, these recent incidents should prompt us to rethink whether overtly partisan work has a legitimate place in the White House and, if so, who should be doing it.

Federal employees’ participation in partisan political activity is governed by the Hatch Act of 1939, which was put into place after accusations that New Deal programs were being used by party bosses to influence Congressional elections. The statute prohibits government officials from engaging in political activity using official titles, at government expense or while on duty. And it prohibits them from using their official capacities to sway an election.

The Hatch Act has a few big exceptions, however: not only the president and vice president but also political appointees, including cabinet members and many senior White House staff members, may do both government and political work in the same office, provided they distinguish between the two.

For instance, White House officials usually use separate BlackBerrys, cellphones and computers for their partisan activities. That way, political calls and e-mail messages coming from White House officials are not legally coming from the White House at all. They are instead “personal capacity” communications by people who happen to be White House staff members — including, in this administration, the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his deputy.

This is not the Hatch Act’s only legal distinction with little grounding in reality: the regulations also allow government employees to speak at partisan fund-raising events, provided they do not explicitly ask for money.

The employees of the White House Office of Political Affairs, which was established under Ronald Reagan to offer advice on the political viability of administration policies, thus spend an enormous amount of their “personal time” moonlighting for the president’s political party.

These distinctions between official work and personal political work are nonsensical. When White House staff members send a message, everyone knows where they work. When they speak at campaign events, everyone knows who they are. Calling partisan political activity by White House staff “personal” rather than “official” is a legal fiction.

There is also no way of knowing how much time is spent on politics instead of official duties because time records for senior political employees are not required. Little is known, for example, about how many trips are taken by the staff of the political affairs office and who pays for them.

Then there are the conflicts of interest that inevitably and frequently arise. Suggestions made to government employees by candidates, contributors and political operatives can easily influence White House policy, whether it be political concerns about a United States attorney or a Senate candidate who is getting in the way. But what is best for a political party does not often reflect what is best for the country — and what is best for the country should be the top priority of full-time federal employees.

Congress should amend the Hatch Act, or the president should issue an executive order, to prohibit all White House staff members from participating in partisan political activity in any capacity during the relatively short time they serve in government. (The act already imposes similar restrictions on federal employees in intelligence and some areas of law enforcement.)

The president and vice president, the only two elected officials in the executive branch, should still be permitted to engage in partisan politics while holding office. But in their partisan duties, they should be supported only by the staff of their political party, and not that of the White House.

Incidents like the Pennsylvania and Colorado primary controversies might still occur even if the White House staff is barred from partisan politics, but they would occur less often. Expanding the Hatch Act would be a change in keeping with the ethics reform that the Obama administration has promised the American people.


Richard W. Painter, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, was the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007.

    The Separation of Politics and State, NYT, 11.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/opinion/14painter.html

In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.

February 8, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — If the Democratic Party has a stronghold on Wall Street, it is JPMorgan Chase.

Its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is a friend of President Obama’s from Chicago, a frequent White House guest and a big Democratic donor. Its vice chairman, William M. Daley, a former Clinton administration cabinet official and Obama transition adviser, comes from Chicago’s Democratic dynasty.

But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions — $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics — some of his biggest supporters, like Mr. Dimon, have become the industry’s chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda.

Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street’s “buyer’s remorse” with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street “fat cats,” they may fight back by withholding their cash.

“If the president doesn’t become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose that support,” said Kelly S. King, the chairman and chief executive of BB&T. Mr. King is a board member of the Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies for the biggest banks, and last month he helped represent the industry at a private dinner at the Treasury Department.

“I understand the public outcry,” he continued. “We have a 17 percent real unemployment rate, people are hurting, and they want to see punishment. But the political rhetoric just incites more animosity and gets people riled up.”

A spokesman for JPMorgan Chase declined to comment on its political action committee’s contributions or relations with the Democrats. But many Wall Street lobbyists and executives said they, too, were rethinking their giving.

“The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,’ ” said a top official at a major Wall Street firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House. “We are not going to play that game anymore.”

Wall Street fund-raisers for the Democrats say they are feeling under attack from all sides. The president is lashing out at their “arrogance and greed.” Republican friends are saying “I told you so.” And contributors are wishing they had their money back.

“I am a big fan of the president,” said Thomas R. Nides, a prominent Democrat who is also a Morgan Stanley executive and chairman of a major Wall Street trade group, the Securities and Financial Markets Association. “But even if you are a big fan, when you are the piñata at the party, it doesn’t really feel good.”

Roger C. Altman, a former Clinton administration Treasury official who founded the Wall Street boutique Evercore Partners, called the Wall Street backlash against Mr. Obama “a constant topic of conversation.” Many bankers, he said, failed to appreciate the “white hot anger” at Wall Street for the financial crisis. (Mr. Altman said he personally supported “the substance” of the president’s recent proposals, though he questioned their feasibility and declined to comment at all on what he called “the rhetoric.”)

Mr. Obama’s fight with Wall Street began last year with his proposals for greater oversight of compensation and a consumer financial protection commission. It escalated with verbal attacks this year on what he called Wall Street’s “obscene bonuses.” And it reached a new level in his calls for policies Wall Street finds even more infuriating: a “financial crisis responsibility” tax aimed only at the biggest banks, and a restriction on “proprietary trading” that banks do with their own money for their own profit.

“If the president wanted to turn every Democrat on Wall Street into a Republican,” one industry lobbyist said, “he is doing everything right.”

Though Wall Street has long been a major source of Democratic campaign money (alongside Hollywood and Silicon Valley), Mr. Obama built unusually direct ties to his contributors there. He is the first president since Richard M. Nixon whose campaign relied solely on private donations, not public financing.

Wall Street lobbyists say the financial industry’s big Democratic donors help ensure that their arguments reach the ears of the president and Congress. White House visitors’ logs show dozens of meetings with big Wall Street fund-raisers, including Gary D. Cohn, a president of Goldman Sachs; Mr. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; and Robert Wolf, the chief of the American division of the Swiss bank UBS, who has also played golf, had lunch and watched July 4 fireworks with the president.

Lobbyists say they routinely brief top executives on policy talking points before they meet with the president or others in the administration. Mr. Wolf, in particular, also serves on the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board led by the former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker.

Mr. Wolf was the only Wall Street executive on the panel and became the board’s leading opponent of what became known as the Volcker rule against so-called proprietary trading, according to participants. Such trading did nothing to cause the crisis, Mr. Wolf argued, as the industry lobbyists do now. (The panel concluded that the crisis established a precedent for government rescue that could enable big banks to speculate for their own gain while taxpayers took the biggest risks.)

Mr. Wolf and Mr. Dimon, who was in Washington last week for meetings on Capitol Hill and lunch with the president, have both pressed the industry’s arguments against other proposed regulations and the bank tax as well — saying the rules could cramp needed lending and send business abroad, according to lobbyists.

Both men are said to remain personally supportive of the president. But UBS’s political action committee has shifted its contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. After dividing its money evenly between the parties for 2008, it has given about 56 percent to Republicans this cycle.

Most of its biggest contributions, of $10,000 each, went to five Republican opponents of Mr. Obama’s regulatory proposals, including Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking minority member of the Banking Committee.

The Democratic campaign committees declined to comment on Wall Street money. But their Republican rivals are actively courting it.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he visited New York about twice a month to try to tap into Wall Street’s “buyers’ remorse.”

“I just don’t know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you,” Mr. Cornyn said.

    In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P., 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html

Illinois Senate Race Worries Democrats Anew

February 4, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — Alexi Giannoulias, the treasurer of Illinois and a basketball-playing friend of President Obama’s, won the Democratic primary here on Tuesday for the Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama. But his victory was hardly the free throw some had expected, setting off a new round of worrying among Democrats that the reliably Democratic seat might be picked off by Republicans in November.

With four others on the ballot, Mr. Giannoulias won 39 percent of the Democratic vote, or, as Republicans preferred to describe it on Wednesday, lost 61 percent of it. A little-known former federal prosecutor who had never run for office, David Hoffman, came within six percentage points of Mr. Giannoulias.

With much on the line here, including the symbolism of the president’s home state possibly slipping away, some Democrats were concerned that the party had played into the game plan of the Republicans, who chose Representative Mark Steven Kirk, a centrist-leaning suburbanite who hopes to appeal to the state’s independent voters and even some moderate Democrats.

Already Wednesday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had issued a Web video mocking Mr. Giannoulias, 33, for what it described as questionable loans made by his family’s bank, his ties to Rod R. Blagojevich, the indicted former governor of Illinois, and more.

“Is this change we can believe in?” the video asks.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Giannoulias to congratulate him on his victory, aides said, but despite the friendship, the White House indicated in the past that it had reservations about his candidacy. At one point, White House officials tried without success to recruit another Democrat, Lisa Madigan, the state attorney general, even after Mr. Giannoulias had made his aspirations clear.

Mr. Obama, who endorsed no one in the primary, has pledged to party officials to do what he can to help keep the seat in Democratic hands. But aides said the president would invest his time and efforts in races across the country and not necessarily devote more attention to the contest for his former seat.

Republicans hold no statewide offices in Illinois and have a clear voter disadvantage (more than 900,000 voted in the Democratic primary for the Senate on Tuesday while about 740,000 voted on the Republican side), but many sounded gleeful on Wednesday.

“This came out about as well — with Alexi limping across the finish line — as it could have,” said Pat Brady, the state’s Republican chairman.

During the primary, Mr. Giannoulias found himself answering criticism of his handling as state treasurer of a college savings program (which sustained $150 million in losses, some of which has been recouped) and of loans made by Broadway Bank, his family’s bank where he worked as a lending officer before entering politics.

Among others who were lent money, Mr. Giannoulias’s opponents noted, was Antoin Rezko, a real estate developer and political fund-raiser whose ties to them — and whose conviction for fraud and bribery — have embarrassed more than a few Illinois politicians.

And the notion that Republicans may lump in Mr. Giannoulias as part of this state’s Democratic troubled political establishment, given the embarrassments involving Mr. Blagojevich (whose corruption trial will begin right in the middle of this campaign season) and others, worries some Democrats as they think ahead to November.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Giannoulias said that he had not worked at his family’s bank for four years and that, like thousands of American family businesses, his was “not immune” to challenges created by “bad decisions in Washington, D.C., and lax oversight on Wall Street.”

“It’s telling,” Mr. Giannoulias said of Mr. Kirk, “that while I’m talking about ideas and creating jobs in Illinois, he’s focused on ridiculous political attacks. What people are looking for is someone who is talking about ideas.”

At a time when bankers and Illinois politicians hardly seem popular, Mr. Giannoulias has already begun portraying Mr. Kirk as a different stereotype that has faced backlash in recent elections — a Washington insider. Mr. Kirk, who is 50 and has served five terms in Congress, “is steeped in Washington, D.C., politics,” Mr. Giannoulias said.

Without doubt, political analysts here said, Mr. Kirk, like all Republicans, faces an uphill challenge in a general election in Illinois. Though each campaign claimed Wednesday that it had polls showing its candidate ahead, the clear trend over the past decade shows that more of the state’s 7.5 million registered voters consider themselves Democrats than Republicans. (Illinois voters do not formally register with a party.)

Mr. Kirk, who has favored abortion rights and cap-and-trade legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions, irks some of the most conservative Republicans in this state, including some who describe themselves as supporters of a Tea Party movement. He has since said he would oppose the cap-and-trade bill, a switch some saw as an effort to appeal more to conservatives. But political analysts believe his best chances of success may actually depend on him seizing independents and fed-up Democrats — segments that may have helped moderate Republicans, like James Edgar and James R. Thompson, former governors, win in this state years ago.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kirk, whose Congressional district has supported Democrats in recent presidential elections, said he saw two movements afoot here at once. He said he observed a broad sense of discontent with government bailouts and spending that played out last month in Massachusetts when a Republican won the Senate seat long held by the late Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat. And he said he recognized an anger, unique to Illinois, over the state’s political dysfunction in recent years.

“Underneath every issue in Illinois is corruption,” he said. “The one-party state is not working.”

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from Chicago, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington.

    Illinois Senate Race Worries Democrats Anew, NYT, 4.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/us/04illinois.html

Editorial

The Massachusetts Election

January 21, 2010
The New York Times

If anyone should have seen it coming in Massachusetts, it is President Obama — the long-shot candidate who rode to electoral victory on a wave of popular impatience and an ability to identify and address voters’ core anxieties.

There are many theories about the import of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat. To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform — even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill, which Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his first year.

Mr. Obama has done many important things on the environment, and in foreign affairs, and in preventing the nation’s banking system from collapsing in the face of a financial crisis he inherited. But he seems to have lost touch with two core issues for Americans: their jobs and their homes.

Mr. Obama’s challenge is that most Americans are not seeing a recovery. They are seeing 10 percent unemployment and a continuing crisis in the housing market. They have watched as the federal government rescued banks, financial firms and auto companies, but they themselves feel adrift, still awaiting the kind of decisive leadership on jobs and housing — in terms of both style and substance — that Mr. Obama promised in 2008.

Mr. Obama was right to press for health care reform. But he spent too much time talking to reluctant Democrats and Republicans who never had the slightest intention of supporting him. He sat on the sidelines while the Republicans bombarded Americans with false but effective talk of death panels and a government takeover of their doctors’ offices. And he did not make the case strongly enough that the health care system and the economy are deeply interconnected or explain why Americans should care about this huge issue in the midst of a recession: If they lose their jobs, they lose their health insurance.

Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing. He appointed an economics team that was entwined with the people and policies that nearly destroyed the economy. He made compromises that resulted in a stimulus bill that wasn’t big enough or properly targeted. Even now, despite a new, rather awkward populist tone, serious relief for homeowners is lacking and financial regulatory reform is in danger of being hijacked by banking lobbyists and partisan politics.

The victory by Mr. Brown, a Republican, should be setting off alarms in the White House. Most immediately, it jeopardizes passage of the reform that the nation desperately needs. The Democrats could try to get the House to pass the Senate’s bill, although their chances seem dim, or as Mr. Obama seemed to suggest on Wednesday, they could seek a stripped-down measure that could win bipartisan support. They certainly should not try to ram a combined House-Senate bill through the Senate before Mr. Brown is sworn in.

The Democrats had an exceptionally weak candidate in Massachusetts, but the results call into question their tactical political competence. The party now has less than 10 months to get it right before the midterm elections, when they are in danger of losing more seats in the House and the Senate. It is indisputable that the Republicans have settled on a tactic of obstruction, disinformation and fear-mongering, but it is equally indisputable that the Democrats have not countered it well.

Mr. Obama has three years to show the kind of vision and leadership on the economy that got him elected — not just because his chances of a second term are at stake, but because the nation needs to get a handle on joblessness and mortgages or the nascent economic recovery could turn into a lost decade or a double-dip recession, or both.

The president is fighting hard for a consumer financial protection agency, in part because he sees it as one element of financial reform that people will understand. What Mr. Obama has to understand is that the agency is unlikely to be as effective as he intends unless other parts of financial reform — regulating derivatives and limiting “too big too fail” banks — also are robust. And homeowners need mortgage relief — not just lower interest rates, but the ability to renegotiate and restructure their loan balances.

We admire Mr. Obama’s intelligence and the careful way he makes decisions. It is reported that he seeks out dissenting views doggedly. He tells Americans the truth. We don’t want Mr. Obama to turn into a hot populist, but he can be too cool and often waits too long to react at big moments. If White House reporters are still making jokes two years from now about checking the president’s pulse, the nation will be in big trouble.

    The Massachusetts Election, NYT, 21.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/opinion/21thur1.html

Courts Roll Back Limits on Spending in Election Law

January 9, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — Even before a landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance law expected within days, a series of other court decisions is reshaping the political battlefield by freeing corporations, unions and other interest groups from many of the restrictions on their advertising about issues and candidates.

Legal experts and political operatives say the cases roll back campaign spending rules to the years before Watergate. The end of decades-old restrictions could unleash a torrent of negative advertisements, help cash-poor Republicans in a pivotal year and push President Obama to bring in more money for his party.

If the Supreme Court, as widely expected, rules against core elements of the existing limits, Democrats say they will try to enact new laws to reinstate the restrictions in time for the midterm elections in November. And advocates of stricter campaign finance laws say they hope the developments will prod the president to fulfill a campaign promise to update the presidential campaign financing system, even though it would diminish his edge as incumbent.

Many legal experts say they expect the court to use its imminent ruling, in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to eliminate the remaining restrictions on advertisements for or against candidates paid for by corporations, unions and advocacy organizations. (The case centers on whether spending restrictions apply to a conservative group’s documentary, “Hillary: The Movie.”)

Even if the court rules more narrowly, legal experts and political advocates say that the 2010 elections will bring the first large-scale application of previous court decisions that have all but stripped away those restrictions. Though the rulings have not challenged the bans on direct corporate contributions to parties and candidates, political operatives say that as a practical matter the rulings and a deadlock at the Federal Election Commission have already opened wide latitude for independent groups to advocate for and against candidates.

“It will be no holds barred when it comes to independent expenditures,” said Kenneth A. Gross, a veteran political law expert at the firm of Skadden Arps in Washington.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the goliath of the lobbying world, is expected to outline its battle plan next week for the midterms. It spent $25 million on advertisements and get-out-the-vote efforts in the 2006 elections and $36 million in 2008, and will spend far more this year, chamber officials say. And in the last election it was already probing the limits of the court’s rulings with commercials like one in New Hampshire denouncing Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, as “a taxing machine.”

Labor unions, stalwart outside allies to the Democrats, plan to take advantage of the changing rules with their own record-setting spending, said Karen Ackerman, political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But business, she argued, had more to gain.

“The corporate side will always have more to spend than the union side,” she said.

Even before the Supreme Court issues its Citizens United ruling, Democrats in the House and the Senate have begun lamenting its expected result. “Clearly, the Republican Party overwhelmingly would benefit,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland vowed a “prompt legislative response” if the Supreme Court rules broadly. In the meantime, he said, the Democratic campaign committee planned to counterattack big donors to outside groups to show “they are not just disinterested citizens.”

Conservatives accused the Democrats of using the specter of corruption as an excuse to silence their opponents. “What this is about is prohibiting information from reaching the American people if it is critical of them, those poor little dears who can’t stand criticism,” said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Republican Senate campaign committee, said: “It is about a nonprofit group’s ability to speak about the public issue. I can’t think of a more fundamental First Amendment issue.”

Still, Mr. Cornyn acknowledged that the expected ruling could “open up resources that have not previously been available” for the Republicans.

Democratic candidates and party committees have raised a total of $396.5 million for the midterms, with $50 million on hand and $10 million debts in public filings released this week. Republicans had raised just $204.7 million, with about $30 million on hand and about $6 million in debts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The campaign finance system imposed after the Watergate scandal began to spring leaks in the 1990s with the large-scale exploitation of unlimited “soft money” contributions to political parties from wealthy individuals, corporations, unions and others. Congress fortified those rules by eliminating soft money with the 2002 campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold, and since then activists and operatives have played cat-and-mouse with regulators in the search for other loopholes.

The Supreme Court began to poke new holes in the system in a 2007 ruling that outside groups could pay for critical commercials attacking individual candidates on specific issues up to the day of the election, as long as the ad did not explicitly urge a “vote for” or “vote against.”

The 2010 midterms will be the first big test of the changing rules in part because in 2008 both major party candidates — Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain — explicitly discouraged independent spending by their supporters. The Federal Election Commission had also punished previous efforts to evade the McCain-Feingold rules severely enough to discourage new attempts.

No such restraints apply this year, in part because the changing composition of the Federal Election Commission has created a deadlock blocking vigorous enforcement. “The cop is gone from the beat,” said Trevor Potter, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center who has also worked for Mr. McCain.

Campaign finance laws block outside groups from coordinating with candidates, but it is easy enough for outside allies to read in news reports where a campaign wants to spend money and what message it wants to send. Such groups also tend to favor negative commercials because they are more potent.

So if the court strikes down the restrictions on outside spending, some legal experts say, the remaining restrictions on direct contributions to campaigns would mean much less because it would be easy to support a campaign through an outside group.

“The campaign finance system would certainly be less regulated than any time since Watergate,” said Richard L. Hasen, a campaign law expert at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

    Courts Roll Back Limits on Spending in Election Law, NYT, 9.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/us/politics/09donate.html